Week Three: Who Belongs As a Member of The Political Community?
This current Our American Values series focuses on four perennial threats that surface whenever American Democracy is most at risk: 1) Political polarization, 2) Conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community, 3) High and growing economic inequality, and 4) Excessive executive power.
In this third week of the new series, Emory University Professor Carol Anderson tells us about how the second threat — conflict over who gets to participate in American politics — is playing-out today in subtle and insidious ways before, during, and after elections. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of African American Studies. Professor Anderson is a nationally recognized historian, educator, and author. For this 2018 interview (that could have been recorded yesterday), she draws on her book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Professor Anderson, however, is probably best known for her 2016 book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide which was a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. This video comes from PBS Newshour and runs 6 minutes and 20 seconds.
“… one of the great ways that way voter suppression works is that it sounds reasonable, until you see how it’s operationalized… ”