How Geology Buries Black Voters
America’s Electoral College seems like a weird quirk but it’s actually racism written in stone. Let me give you an example, with a tip of the whole head to Latif Naseer.
This is an electoral map of the American South… from 100 million years ago.
See the southern coast, running through the Carolinas, Mississippi, Alabama. That crescent of land that was the Cretaceous-era coastline and remains blessed/cursed with rich, fertile soil. Lazy, evil white people dragged enslaved people here — families, women and children — and worked them 18 hours a day to pick cotton. Raping, torturing, murdering and selling them at will.
As Booker T Washington said, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers.”
After they freed themselves, many descendants of the enslaved still lived in the south, through much persecution, which continues to this day. Part of this persecution is the Electoral College. It means that while their bodies have power, their votes do not.
Let’s look at a modern electoral map.
These blue areas have a high Black population and are voting against the white supremacist. But because of the Electoral College (and active suppression) those votes don’t count.
America Is Built On Voter Suppression
America was not founded as a democracy, unless you mean literally a Greek slave state. At Independence, only 6% of the population could vote. America is founded on voter suppression. That is their bedrock.
Their founding institutions are based on preserving rich, white power, not people power lol. That’s just the propaganda, which is remarkably effective. America was actually one of the last modern democracies to get universal suffrage, in 1962. Fifty-six countries, including Sri Lanka, got it earlier.
