The New Yorker Radio Hour - Voter Suppression in the Twenty-First Century

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

In the November midterm elections, Stacey Abrams, a gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, arrived at her polling place to cast a vote for herself, only to have a poll worker claim that she had already filed for an absentee ballot. Carol Anderson’s book “One Person, No Vote” explores how measures designed to purge voters rolls or limit voting have targeted Democratic and particularly minority voters. Anderson sees voter-identification laws and a wide range of bureaucratic snafus as successors to the more blatantly racist measures that existed before the Voting Rights Act; she describes the resurgence of voter suppression as an expression of white rage. “It is not what we think of in terms of Charlottesville and the tiki torches,” she tells David Remnick. “It's the kind of methodical, systematic, bureaucratic power that undermines African-Americans’ advances." White Americans, she says, see themselves as trapped in a kind of “zero sum” situation, in which all advances for people of color must come at whites’ expense. Plus, the staff writer Jon Lee Anderson journeys up the Madre de Dios River in the Peruvian Amazon to observe as the Mashco Piro—one of the few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes—begin a fraught, possibly fatal engagement with the outside world. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Maybe at no time since the heyday of the civil rights movement, has voting rights been so much in the news. For some years now, and especially since the Supreme Court struck down elements of the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, many states have made voting harder and less accessible. The measures they adopt are usually presented as ways to prevent voter fraud, but largely, if not entirely. These measures have been targeted at Democrats, and in particular, black voters who mostly lean Democratic. A deep analysis of voter suppression was published recently, and it was entitled, One Person, No Vote. The author is Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University, and in her view, race and racism remain at the dead center of the problems around voting. Dr. Anderson, thanks for joining us.

Yes, hi. Now, you're talking to me now from Atlanta, and when we heard that Stacey Abrams, who was running for governor of Georgia, herself was almost blocked from voting this November. We heard that it was only when a poll worker told her that she'd already voted absentee. And in the end, the only way she was able to cast her vote in her telling was that she understood voting laws and she was able to advocate for herself and probably the TV camera. trailing behind her didn't hurt her case either. But that should give us some sense of how complicated things were in Georgia, no? Oh, absolutely. And deliberately complicated. So in the areas around Atlanta and in Atlanta, there was a four and a half hour wait time because they didn't have the power cords for the voting machines. In the Atlanta University Center, which is where you have

Morehouse and Spelman and Clark Atlanta, there were two working machines where there were supposed to be nine working machines. These are predominantly black areas. Yes. They ran out of provisional ballots. I mean, prior to that time, there's this thing called exact match, which deals with voter registration. And it says that when you register to vote, then the Secretary of State, that would be Brian Kemp's office. Brian Kemp, who was not only running the voting system, but also Stacey Abrams' opponent in the gubernatorial race and the eventual winner. Right. If your name doesn't, if any of the information doesn't match up exactly with that that the state has in its own database, like its driver's database, then your voter registration is put in this limbo. Well, the AP found that in August or somewhere in September or so that 53,000 voter registrations had been put in this limbo and 70% of them were African American.

So White Rage was the title of your last book. And White Rage has shaped our country and our history. And it certainly shaped the 2016 election. Did you feel that White Rage was a big element of the midterm elections as well? As I define white rage, it is not what we think of in terms of like Charlottesville and the Tiki Torchets, but it's the kind of methodical, systematic, bureaucratic power that undermines African Americans advances. And what we see here is that rallying up to wipe out the possibility of a Stacey Abrams, to wipe out the possibility of an Andrew Gillum, to, wipe out all of the kinds of remaining vestiges of Barack Obama. I mean, what you're seeing here is this kind of entrenched last gasp effort to continue to define America and American in terms of whiteness only.

Well, is it a death rattle or is this just going to be a persistent current forever or as long as we can. imagine it in American public life? I think part of what is really going to take are that the majority of whites, and remember that the majority of whites who have voted have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964 after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, where the federal government put its power and authority behind recognizing African American citizenship. that was the moment that you had the break with whites in the Democratic Party. And so it is going to require whites to move beyond this sense of a zero-sum game,

that the only way that African Americans can get will be at whites' expense. The only way that African Americans can get to college, African Americans can vote, African Americans can have a job, African Americans can have decent housing, African Americans can have decent health care. All of that has to come at whites expense. That is the framing that Donald Trump uses. And that's why you get the language of stolen elections. That's why that language is so powerful. It is about something being stolen from whites. And that is the conversation that whites have to have within their own communities, because this isn't about stealing from them. This is about empowering and making America stronger. before the 1965 Voting Rights Act and between Reconstruction and

then, there were all kinds of barriers to voting for African Americans, particularly in the South, including, you know, being shown a jar of jelly beans

and could you count the number of jelly beans in the jar and preposterous things like that? It sounds like it is not, it's a bit more sophisticated, but

the spirit of it is not a great deal different. The spirit is the same because the way that disfranchisement worked pre-1965, pre-voting rights act, was to go after the characteristics, the societally imposed characteristics, be it illiteracy because we've underfunded black schools, be it poverty because of slavery and Jim Crow and disparate income. I mean, all of these

things were designed to get around the 15th Amendment that says, that the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And so you just take the characteristics. That's what is happening now once the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Is it possible to give a number to this? How many black folks in general in this country were prevented from voting or was made extremely difficult for them to vote? Is there any way to put a number on this? Yes, we've got some sense of this. For instance, that in Wisconsin in the 2016 election, 8% of whites and 27% of African Americans were prevented from voting because of Wisconsin's voter ID laws.

And note that these states recognize this when they write these laws. North Carolina knew it when it wrote its voter ID laws, which led the Fourth Circuit to say, you have targeted African Americans with nearly surgical precision. Now, on the other hand, did it surprise you that in Florida, which is, you know, a pretty red state, they voted to re-enfranchise felons? And that was a long-term, nonpartisan movement, grassroots movement, that managed to frame that narrative at these are people who have served their time. They have paid their debt to society. How long are we going to continue to punish them? And so they were tapping at these multiple narratives in America.

American society. And that felony disfranchisement law came out of reconstruction in Florida in 1868. And it was a response to the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that provided that African American men had the right to vote. And so you see this kind of backlash against black voting. And that's what the felony disfranchisement law did. Now, since the 2016 election, we've heard a lot about what Democrats need and should do to win in 2020. And a lot of that talk revolves around how can Democrats better appeal to Trump voters? And the idea being that somehow the Democratic Party would reestablish the coalition it had in

1968 with Robert Kennedy, meaning working class people, minorities, as well as so-called urban elites. Now, your work would seem to suggest maybe a different approach. What would you say to Democratic strategists who are looking ahead to the next presidential election and want to win? You will not win by trying to appeal to those where racism is their driver. But are you suggesting that the entire Trump vote is racist, that the entire Trump vote is not to be impinged upon by Democratic appeal? What I mean is that when we have a party, a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-class party that is then trying to make an appeal to those who believe that babies should be in cages,

who believe that it is okay for police to shoot unarmed black people. who believed that there was nothing wrong that happened in Charlottesville, then how do you find that middle ground? You can't. You can't. You can't. That's what I'm asking. In other words, how do you appeal to voters who say, look, I don't want to see mothers separated from children at the border, but there needs to be some rational immigration policy that's not open borders. I'm posing this question like a certain kind of voter.

Where do I go? I remember seeing this article in Vox that went to, I think it was Whitley, Kentucky, where people were on the Affordable Care Act. And 80% voted for Trump. And the first question was, so how's your life changed by having access to health insurance? And they were raving about it. And then the reporter said, but you know that the Republicans want to do away with the Affordable Care Act.

They're like, yeah, we heard them say it, but they don't mean it. And I'm like, no, no, they really do mean it. And then came the piece. Yeah, but you know, there are those other people. Yeah. And they've got better health insurance than we do. And they don't deserve it. Well, and now we're back to the subject that we started with, which is white rage.

How does white rage, which has been more or less a constant in American life, how does it be eradicated? How does it burn itself out? Whites really have to have the conversation with whites about how this thing really works, about the damage that it really does, and how it violates every principle that, They say they hold deer. And for instance, we spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs, basically to have mass incarceration of black people and brown people. And we know that the war on drugs doesn't work. It didn't work. But could you imagine what we could have done with that trillion dollars in terms of providing affordable access to college or affordable access to health care?

or what we could have done for infrastructure and retraining for a green economy. I mean, these are the kinds of things that are life-changing. But when we focus in on that zero-sum game, that's when we do damage. White rage does damage. And we have to understand the depth of that damage. Dr. Anderson, thank you very much. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate this conversation.

Carol Anderson is a professor at Emory University. And if you're interested, we did a long segment about voter fraud just about a year ago. And you can find that link on our Twitter feed at New Yorker Radio. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The authorities in India are working to recover the body of an American killed on a remote island. He reportedly intended to convert the native population. John Allen Chow was a young man filled with a sense of adventure and a calling to spread the gospel.

He managed to get himself to North Sentinel Island, which is about 700 miles off the mainland of India, and he went there to preach to a group of pre-modern people who have fiercely resisted all contact with outsiders. Chow's killing by the Sentinel Islanders is bringing attention to the few uncontacted tribes left in the world. The number of uncontacted tribes, people living truly apart from civilization as the rest of us know it, is vanishingly small and getting smaller every year. The conflicts are felt most keenly, perhaps, in the Amazon rainforest. Development brings loggers and miners into close proximity with some of the few uncontacted tribes that remain.

Staff writer John Lee Anderson has covered Latin America for decades, and he knows the Amazon better than most. Even before he became a journalist, which was when he was quite young, he had taken a journey up the river called Madre de Dios. I had an unusual upbringing. I had an inordinate admiration for people who were able to do things with their hands to hunt, to live off the land. And from a quite young age, 11, 12, I had been trying to do it.

My parents had tried to facilitate it where they could. So I spent a year in Africa when I was 13, and I'd spent a year on the mosquito coast, 17 and 18, living and working as a macheteo, as a peasant, earning a dollar a day with guys. Perifuna people on the coast of Honduras and learning how to climb coconut trees and use a machete and to fish in a dugout canoe. And I had a great admiration for people that knew the forest, knew the wilderness, and could survive in it. I felt like I was a city boy wanting to learn the original secrets of life. It's funny because I realize as I'm talking about this, that this is the stuff of, you know, adventure tourism and even television shows now. And it just wasn't then.

I first went to the Madre de Dios when I was 20 years old. So I was in the late 70s with an idea to go up river to where, you know, in those days, we still talked about wild Indians. And I was pretty gauche, and I thought that that would be, it was something I'd always wanted to see. I wanted to see the original world. I was young. I was not yet a journalist. I had had a couple of years at college and left to go to South America to explore.

So I hired a man to take me upriver into what was called the Manu Forest. It had recently been declared a national park. It's part of the riverhead of the Amazon. In the corner of Peru, neighboring Brazil and Bolivia, it's a vast region, a kind of an amazing biosphere that is also home to some of the, some of the world's most isolated people. And I camped on a sandbar near an Amarika'eira indigenous village. I'd been told that they were unfriendly and they weren't hostile, but they were, they didn't meet my eye. I knew that they were not happy at seeing me there. I now realized that what I was seeing was a community

that had been devastated in the previous half century. They had been, the Amarcaide had been one of the great warrior tribes of the region. But the time I went there, they were about 500 left. I wanted to go further up. This was still the main river. I wanted to go off into the tributaries. It was like getting off from a highway onto a trail, really. And we did.

We went up the Manu River, which is then into the National Park. I forget whether it was our first or second night up the river. But you know, these are long days in the canoe. And there were suddenly two men on the shore. I remember them as incredibly strong, fit men. One in particular, I'll never forget. He had this black hair. It was like a mop on his head.

and it was cut ragged around his shoulders. And they were standing over a dead peckery, a wild boar. And my boatman hesitated, but we stopped. We hadn't had meat. In the end, we had a meal with these two men who were, for me, of an unknown tribe. And we had no means of communication. And they just stared at me all the time. And at one point, I remember looking across at this one,

One man who particularly fascinated me because he was so strong looking, he'd cut off pieces and we were eating them. And he had the actual bone, the actual shank, and was holding it with his feet. And with his arms, he was chewing off the rest. And I thought to myself, this is a glimpse of ancient man. There we were. That was it. I returned to the Madre de Dios this time because. of the mysterious appearance over the last several years of the Mashko Pido Indians.

For almost 100 years, they remained in the forest. And, you know, there were occasional appearances. But it wasn't until the last four or five years that the Mashko had been repeatedly coming out. Even adventure tourists had begun to see these people who would appear on the riverbank. In some cases, they would be threatening. In other cases, they would be just staring at them. There was an incident in going back to 2011 where they killed a man. In the years since then, they had been more and more sightings of them.

And then suddenly, this last year, they killed with a bow and arrow, a young man in a village of Machiganga Indians. Now, the extraordinary thing is, as I say, that for about 80 to 100 years, the Mashko had disappeared into the forest. Now, suddenly they're coming out. So anthropologists and others, the sitegeist is full of papers and findings and debates about what's going on. Why are these people coming out? You know, they're now prey to drug traffickers, to men seeking hardwood timber, which is worth, you know, hundreds of thousands, a single tree.

And so on gold, diamonds. The speculation was that DiMashko were coming out in distress, that they were coming out, because, because they can no longer survive inside. There was a kind of growing consensus and an alarm spreading that perhaps, you know, it is the end time for these people. So, Damasco coming out, forced the government to address the situation. So that meant that the government, through its culture ministry and its recently created, office of isolated and uncontacted indigenous peoples staffed by a handful, literally a handful,

of young anthropologists with almost no budget whatsoever. Now we're forced to consider making contact with Dimashko to find out what the problem was, why they were attacking, why they were coming out. And so they began last summer to make what they called control, expeditions of controlled contact. They have an outpost on the river,

and through native interpreters from the Jine tribe, who are basically cousins of the Moshko, they've convinced them to make their appearances there. The outpost is up a high bluff, and there's a longhouse there with a water tank and a generator. And they have a bench on the edge of the bluff, and they spend their days looking across to see if there's any appearance by the Moshk.

The first time I saw them, I saw a mass of naked people standing against the white scree of rock, of the far riverbank. This was maybe the fifth or sixth they had had in such encounter. when the scouts and the anthropologist arrived on land, they were immediately besieged by the group in a friendly way, because they knew them now, particularly by the children who climbed on them. They were inspecting them. They searched their bodies.

I noticed that one of the scouts, one of the Gine women working with the anthropologist, it was named Nelly. She was quite a chubby woman. And I noticed that the women were sort of nigh, needing her breasts. And then Rommel, the sort of lead Gine scout interpreter, we watched this as the children sort of made him run with them and do races.

Anyway, there was, you know, there was all of this milling around, there was a lot of playing. You could see that they were also making faces to one another. Usually this would be the children with Rommel. The adults would come up and watch this. and sometimes they would join in too. And I could see the anthropologist asking questions. Back at the camp, back at the post, I asked Nellie what was going on.

And she said, well, they saw how fat I was, and they said, you're pregnant. And I said, no, I'm not pregnant, I'm just fat. They didn't know what that was. and one of the women said, well, I am, and she squeezed her breasts and squirted her breast milk in Nellie's face. It was this kind of haphazardness,

but they had begun to get pretty much register who was who. They knew who the leader was, and he was there that day. I immediately recognized him. A young man about 22 tall called Camotolo. And they talk a lot about Camatolo. They say that Camotolo seems to understand that the outside world is right there, that it has certain benefits. He'd always expressed a lot of interest in their canoe.

He would often go and sit in it. Two things that had emerged, the Mashko did not swim and could. could not fish. They had no canoes. They lived in the forest. So this is very unusual. But so far, they'd been frustrated in discovering why they were coming out. The team, you know, they worried about the fact that they weren't in full control of this idea of a kind of pure contact. The lead anthropologist, who was Luis Felipe Torres, a young guy, was full of sort of self-doubt about whether or not this was a good thing, but he didn't know what else to do.

it had fallen upon them to look after these people. So, you know, here you have had a young, you know, progressive Peruvian from the city who'd learned anthropology, but felt a moral quandary about whether what they were doing was ultimately right. They were having to respond to them because they had killed someone because there was a clamor from the communities where these people had been killed that these people needed to be rained in after this visit. for the first time I saw the kind of fragility of their existence there and their vulnerability to the outside world because there was a doctor who was part of the group as well. And he was really concerned because he said two of the women had coughs. And he began to work on a kind of an emergency plan. in case they had begun succumbing to flu.

And he told me there was a three-day rule. With indigenous communities, I asked him what he meant by it. I said they began dying within three days. The children in particular begin to die just like that. They drop like flies within three days. He said he knew that eventually there would be an epidemic and it would be devastating to the Moschgo. So they agreed to come back again.

We'd been waiting for them. It was the day they were supposed to come, and they didn't show, they didn't show, they didn't show, and then finally, I heard this excited roar, and there they were. But this time it was different. This time, only three men appeared. Camotolo, another, and a boy. And the older man walked sideways to the edge of the forest,

to a group of bushes, and he kind of hid himself there. The anthropologist was really worried. worried. And he said, you know, this is, this doesn't look good to me. They might be planning an attack. Where are the women? And he explained to me that in the history of these encounters, this kind of controlled contact thing, that in the past 40 years there have been 60 scouts killed by indigenous peoples. And usually the attacks occur at this stage in the contact. As they were getting ready to go in the boat, the women appeared. and the children.

What I felt I saw on this trip was a glimpse of the original world as its ending. People are no longer, metropolitan, urban Americans, Peruvians, everywhere, are losing primary experience. We're no longer having direct contact with the original world. Where I was, it's still there. the very original world

before all of our history before Columbus, before Christ, before all of that stuff. How we were when it was just us in nature, it's disappearing, it's disappearing, and it probably will disappear, if not in our lifetimes, in our children's lifetime. It's going.

The Mashkopito are coming out of the jungle. There's only 100 isolated groups left in the world. 70 of them live in this area of Peru and Brazil. This is it. This is it. This is the end. This is the end. That's an extraordinary thing. Staff writer John Lee Anderson. He traveled to the Amazon in 2016. That's our show for today, and I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon, Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.