When Neutral Is Not Neutral

Here are a few recent examples of supposedly race-neutral policies that are anything but. Most have to do with voting rights, but not all.

For instance, in Ohio, people who live in counties with high unemployment are able to receive EBT (food stamps) without having to show they are looking for work. People who live in counties with lower unemployment have to show they are looking for work. Well, wonder of wonders, guess who lives in the exempt counties? White people. And while the unemployment rate may be lower in the counties where black folks are more likely to live, that's the overall unemployment rate, not the black unemployment rate, which history shows is usually at least twice the white unemployment rate. (And I wonder how the exact unemployment cutoff percent was determined, too. Cherry-picking?)

On voting, there are almost too many examples to name, but here are a couple.

Native Americans living on reservations are not served by the U.S. Postal Services to their doors. (Now there's a fact I did not know until recently.) Whether they mind that or not, I don't know, but they've gotten by using P.O. boxes in nearby towns. Now, though, this reality is being used by the legislature of North Dakota to bar native people from voting, because after 2012, when Heidi Heitkamp won reelection to her seat in the U.S. Senate by about 3,000 votes, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law insisting that the voter IDs required at the polls show a street address. Which, as they knew, many reservation-based native people do not have because of the USPS policy. Clever, huh? What you almost might call surgical precision in its targeting.

Then there's the attempt in Alabama a few years ago to close DMVs (where voter registration takes place) in black-majority counties across the state... that was abandoned after major outcry. Now, instead, we have Georgia enforcing an "exact match" name policy that just happens to snag way more black and Latino voters than it does white voters. 53,000 of them, in fact. (Hyphenated names, names with accents in them that may or may not be included depending on data entry, unusual names that get misspelled by workers... gee, who would those details affect the most?) Not to mention the secretary of state for Georgia — the one who's responsible for free and fair elections — is a white guy who's also running for governor against a black woman, so he has no interest in making sure black people get to vote.

Oh, and Indiana has purged 20,000 voters... and an Ohio court just upheld that state's purging. As Ari Berman has documented, Florida has a history of purging black and Latino voters by labeling them felons when they aren't; I'm hoping the state will pass its November ballot initiative to restore voting rights to people who have served their sentences, which would take care of these purges as well.

The clever part is that these purges and other exclusions remove some white voters too, because it's a numbers game: as long as the few white voters excluded are greatly outnumbered by the voters of color, it works for the cause, because it's all about winning, rather than having free and fair elections.