The above title comes from words spoken in 1964 by Fannie Lou Hamer in remarks she delivered at a rally in Harlem. These were not mere remarks but testimony to the treatment she received at the hands of state authorities for the unpardonable sin of becoming a registered voter.
Her remarks at that rally recounts how she was treated after one of her attempts to register. With others, she was arrested, brutally beaten, and when she was released and able to return to her home, she was discharged from her employment as a time and record keeper on a cotton plantation. This brutal outcome became all the more painful when, as a result of her being discharged from her job and ordered to leave the plantation, she was separated from her husband for many months. Ms. Hammer’s employer refused to release her husband from his employment contract to pick cotton.
You can almost hear Nina Simone in the background singing Mississippi Goddamn:
“You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddamn.
That's it!”
Today, arguments rage over voter registration and protection of the integrity of elections. But in 1962 there were no arguments. If anyone wanted to register to vote in the south, all they need do is pass a simple literacy test. Part of this test required the applicant to explain a random excerpt of the Constitution to the satisfaction of the local voter registrar. Ms. Hamer became a voter on her third try.
When she went to vote, she discovered that she failed to pay two poll taxes. Mississippi, Goddamn.
Recently, and by recently I mean a couple of days ago, while listening to news reports, I began to realize that much of the social progress realized decades ago was now near illusory. As I once again geared up to rail (if only to myself) against the injustices of our time, I recalled Ms. Hamer’s cry from decades ago. I too am sick and tired of arguing the same issues over and over, and then over again.
Let’s begin with voting rights in this century. Back in the last century, voting rights were adversely impacted by three things: the literacy test, payment of a poll tax, and drawing voting districts to dilute the representation of specific groups in the electoral and governing processes.
The literacy test and poll tax were eliminated by Constitutional Amendment XXIV. Under the Voting Right Act (VRA) of 1965, specific states and jurisdictions were required to obtain a pre-clearance by the Department of Justice before implementing any revision of voting district lines. Under the VRA, the Department of Justice looked these revisions to ensure that their impact did not dilute the impact of voters in historically marginalized or excluded communities. All of this was to prevent citizens seeking to vote from suffering racial discrimination under state authority.
While the poll tax and literacy test have gone the way of the dinosaur, states have continued to press restrictions targeted toward specific citizens. Take for example Voter ID laws requiring that either a driver’s license or state ID card be presented at the time of voting. This is clearly targeted at urban dwellers who don’t drive so they don’t need a driver’s license. As for the state ID card, some people are unable to afford the fee to obtain one – a poll tax in state ID’s clothing.
Add to that the reduction in the number of polling places in some jurisdictions. Too often, certain voting districts – predominantly majority white – have polling places conveniently accessible to voters. Other districts – predominantly majority black – are configured in such a manner that polling places are inconveniently located sometimes miles away from where the majority of voters reside.
These efforts are not designed to eliminate the participation of certain voting populations; rather, they are designed to limit the participation of these voting populations so as not to upset the status quo.
And the proponents of these efforts justified them as necessary to prevent voter fraud. As the Brennan Center for Justice found in its 2007 report, The Truth About Voter Fraud, that the incidence of voter fraud rates equaled between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Subsequent studies over the following 16 years have consistently supported this finding.
But more pernicious than the above voter suppression efforts is the level of gerrymandering that is occurring in certain states – Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, and even Mississippi, Goddamn immediately come to mind. For that we can thank the United States Supreme Court.
The Court has held that gerrymandering intended for a “political” purpose does not raise constitutional issues, as opposed to “racial” gerrymandering which does. Alabama is in the throes of trying to make its blatant racial gerrymandering appear to be a more benign garden variety political gerrymandering.
Add to the above the striking of similarly situated voters off the voting lists through periodic “audits” of the voter registration rolls and we end up with a perfect storm of voter suppression.
These efforts are made by public officials in our democratic system, presumably working for and allegiant to all the people in our democracy. However, too often these same officials deprive certain people of their right to meaningfully participate in the affairs of their community. Why? To better ensure the perpetuation of these officials to retain the power to rule. Not govern, Rule.
So why are these practices allowed to exist in the world’s oldest continuous democracy? The short answer is lots of reasons. Start with the fact that we are a socially, culturally, politically polarized society. Our polarization is fueled by a daily avalanche of information.
The problem with too much information is that most of us can’t process it in any meaningful way. In the 1970s, Professor Donald Schon wrote Beyond the Stable State in which he grappled with the adverse effect that too much information would have on people’s decision making in a democracy. Before home computers, before the internet, before cell phones Schon noted the exponential increase of information.
His fear was that with too much information dumped daily on the public, individuals would choose either to ignore allinformation or embrace that information that confirms a preexisting bias. Either choice could lead to a polarized society making it increasingly difficult for people to join in common cause to resolve important issues in our communities. Eventually, with chaos increasing, common engagement in democratic governance would become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
It’s almost like Schon had time travelled from the 1970s to the 2020s.
With too much information shoved onto us, it’s increasingly difficult to discern what is fact and what is fiction. We live in an age where unsupported conspiracy theories serve as solid information. We live in an Orwellian age where we have facts competing with “alternative” facts. With each passing year, our democratic common denominator reduces, making it more difficult to act in our common interests.
In 1908, a Jew from England named Israel Zangwill penned a play entitled "The Melting Pot.” The play’s title became a metaphor for the diversity of people who have assimilated into and shaped American society. Over the ensuing decades the concept of salad bowl gained currency, the idea being that America is comprised of several independent groups making up a new whole. This is the America as Cobb Salad theory. I tend toward the salad metaphor. N
Wittingly or unwittingly, abetting this demise of our sense of common purpose, the exploitation of our overwhelming information flow, and our lack of tools to discern fact from fiction, the efficacy of our system of public schools has eroded over the past five decades.
Which brings me to say that I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired about the state of our public school system. Over the past decades, public schools have been financially starved by communities that fail to see their school systems as valuable public goods.
Along with the financial starvation diet, incrementally our public schools are being gutted by the growth of charter schools and the allure of private schools. Too often charter and private schools are thought to deliver results superior to their public-school counterparts. However, our public schools have to exist in a climate of the combined apathy towards and ineptitude in operating our system of public schools. Moreover, public schools cannot cherry-pick their students. Public schools are open to all kids in the community.
For a large portion of our history, particularly over the past one hundred plus years, our public schools were the equal to any school system in any other industrialized country in the world. Now, too often, we’re lagging behind our competitors on the global stage.
Don’t believe me? Let’s examine the following. In a 2008 poll, 90% of American respondents thought our public schools were equal to or better than schools anywhere in the world. Maybe the other 10% were onto something.
Schools perform a number of functions in society. Chief among them is the function of preparing students to take their place in the economy. Although always important, it’s now an especially important function in our globalized economy. If schools can’t prepare kids to compete in the marketplace, not only are these kids cheated out of the future they deserve, but over time the national wellbeing suffers as well.
To illustrate, in 2018, a large group of 15-year-olds throughout the world participated in taking standardized science and math tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development The results are disturbing: in math, American kids fell below the average established by the group, The top five finishers were from Asian nations. In fact, of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, the United States finished in 30th place.
In science it was a little better, we finished in 11th place. But before we high-five ourselves, the top five nations were Singapore, Macao, Estonia, Japan, and Finland. As an aside, Singapore also came in first on the math tests. Maybe they copped the answers beforehand?
To bring it home, in my state the results recently released from the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) show just 33 percent of Rhode Island public school students in grades 3 through 8 are proficient in English language arts, while 29.6 percent are proficient in math, meaning they either met or exceeded expectations on the standardized test. Students took the test in the spring of 2022.
Putting this in stark relief, 67% of students did not meet or exceed proficiency standards in English and 70.4% did not meet or exceed proficiency in math. The RICAS is not administered to high school students like our neighbors in Massachusetts (MCAS). Rhode Island uses scores from the PSATs and SATs where scores fell 5 points below 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
There are any number of reasons for these dismal results. Underfunding, political games, an increasingly diverse student population, arcane and moribund policies and procedures. Charter schools were no shining beacons of academic light; for example, one charter scored only 23% of its students met or exceeded that RICAS math proficiencies.
This presents a serious threat to our economic well-being, not to mention the maintenance of our democracy.
I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired….
“For some time, we have known that the real security of this nation lies in the integrity of its institutions and the trust and informed competence of its people.”
The trust and informed competence. The above quote is from House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino’s statement opening the Impeachment Hearing of Richard Nixon in May 1974.
It’s the words informed competence that got me. History has shown that democracies depend on the informed competence of its citizens. This informed competence is not defined by which of several policies is supported by the majority of citizens. Rather competence is determined by how informed a citizenry is when choosing between competing policies.
Bringing it back to Fannie Lou Hamer, she was a sharecropper’s daughter who had to leave whatever schooling available to her at the age of 12 to go to work in the fields.
On her own initiative, Ms. Hamer wanted to be registered as a voter for the simple reason that she would then be, in her words, “a first class” citizen.” She knew firsthand what being any less than a “first class” felt like. In the segregated south of the early to mid-20th Century, the culture regarding African-Americans still reverberated with the words written by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott case of 1857: … [African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect….”
Although Ms. Hamer didn’t attend a private school in preparation of an Ivy League academic career in the law, she knew Taney’s words. She lived these words each day of her life. She possessed direct knowledge of second class standing.
And given the daily reality of her life, did she become a violent radical working to overthrow the system? Did she pick up a weapon and storm the Mississippi state capital building? Did she ignore the the law because it was more convenient to do so?
No. She did not. Ms. Hamer worked within the system to achieve what she sought, first class citizenship. And she did that by seeking to become a registered voter. And once achieved, she worked to organize others in her home state of Mississippi, and over time in other communities throughout the nation.
Because of her lived experience, Ms. Hamer understood, in ways most of us will never fully know or appreciate, what being an engaged and active citizen means. She embraced her citizenship and her responsibilities in ways many of us eschew.
This brings me back to the “informed competence” question. In the mid-20th century, there were a limited number of information sources. There were daily newspapers, a few am radio stations, and three television networks with local affiliates to “inform” the citizenry of the day’s events. True, there were the sensationalized tabloids containing two-headed goats and Hollywood gossip, but overall, the information was consistent across most platforms.
Today, we have multiple cable and streaming services and the internet allowing us to access any number of sites and platform. Social media, our new Wild West, allows anyone either anonymously or in their own name to post any unsourced allegation or, dare I say, “fact.” We get bombarded by so much information from so many disparate sources that it’s impossible for our minds to grapple with this onslaught of word sludge. Once again, and I can’t say this enough, Donald Schon was proven right.
Over the past sixty years, in general, the performance of our public schools has declined. We have asked our schools to do more to meet the diverse needs of an ever-increasing number of students. And as the need for educational services increased, school resources either remained level funded or decreased as taxpayers were reluctant to put their money where their kids were.
To make ends meet, too many school systems were forced to cut programs, courses, capital expenditures for modern educational equipment and, yes, even books. Meanwhile, increased attention was given to out-of-school activities in athletics and jobs.
By way of example, the high school I attended many years ago had extensive language offerings in French, Spanish, Latin, German, there was a small class in Japanese, and one kid took an independent class in Russian. Today, if a school teaches Latin and Spanish it’s doing well, and if it also teaches French, it hit the foreign language trifecta.
When I went to high school, we had myriad history classes ranging from world and United States history to ancient and British history. There were three government classes (e.g., civics, Problems of American Democracy, etc.), and two economics courses. In the 1980s, when I began teaching in a small public high school, there were no government or basic macroeconomics courses – until I started them.
As I have written before, those who seek to whitewash the history curriculum and censor or ban what books that kids can read are driving a stake through the heart of public education. The zealots who seek to transform public education in advancing their narrow social and political interests are not just preventing kids from being exposed to various “uncomfortable” truths, but more importantly are robbing these kids of a robust ability to reason and think.
Fannie Lou Hamer and millions like her lived the uncomfortable truths of their lives each day. They offer us in our time a lesson in important truths. Our democracy is not perfect, but it does provide individuals with a voice on issues and policies that affect us all. Our system provides each of us the opportunity to impact political outcomes, if only we seize that opportunity.
Fannie Lou Hamer seized her opportunity. It took her three times to become a registered voter. Once registered, she worked to secure for others the ability to become registered voters. She used her status as a “first class citizen” to advocate change in her community and others similarly situated. She became an active participant in the political process.
Ms. Hamer had faith in our democracy. She understood that she might not win every political battle, but she also understood that in the long run, if she and others like her continued their advocacy, our democratic system provided them the best chance to ultimately succeed.
In 2023, many of our institutions are under assault by those who think that only their voice is valid, that only their way of life is proper, and that only their beliefs should be imposed on others.
In 2024, our democracy once again will be tested. Indeed, if I wrote in 2020 “Justice Is On The Ballot,” in 2024 I say plainly “Democracy Is On The Ballot.” This is the challenge of our time.
In 2024, candidates will offer a virtual cornucopia of policies and promises. Most will not agree with every position of each candidate seeking our votes. But I will have one litmus test to determine who I will vote for. That test is who will stand and preserve our democracy?
I may not agree with a candidate’s positions, but if they stand for democratic principles, I can at least be sure that the policy disputes we might have prior to the election will continue in the days and months after the election.
I have faith in democracy, Fannie Lou Hammer level of faith. I urge all to exhibit that level of faith in next year’s political process and defend our democracy.
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