alt Hacker NewsI'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
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One example would be a black neighborhood having 1 voting machine so that the line is so long there isn’t time for everyone to vote.
Meanwhile a white neighborhood has dozens of polling places, each with many machines.
The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.
This DOES intentionally target black people. It's an intentional strategy to have "plausible" deniability dating back decades:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”