Former President Trump’s felony convictions highlight the dual legal system present in this country. While a powerful, white former president can have 34 felony convictions and still run for the highest office in the nation, the average Black or Brown person with a single felony conviction will never vote again. The ACLU reports that felony disenfranchisement impacts more than 5.8 million Americans. Felony disenfranchisement is one glaring example of disproportionate and systemic harm impacting Black and Brown communities.
Why is the Supreme Court rolling back the clock on our civil rights? In this episode of Twice as Good, Sara and Mitra are joined by two special guests, Madiba Dennie, author of the new book “The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution And How We The People Can Take It Back,” and Brandon Tensley, the national politics reporter at Capital B News. Together they discuss the great retrenchment: the assault on Black political power, as well as the states fighting back. They invoke the wisdom of Frederick Douglass and affirm the importance of staying in the fight for equity and justice for all.
In Madiba Dennie’s book, she writes, “I’m both professionally and personally invested in radically reforming our socio-political and legal systems, and I can treat the Supreme Court’s embrace of oppressive legal theories with the rigor and rage it deserves.”
This reformation is precisely what we aim to spotlight. The harkening back to an America where women lacked agency over their bodies, where the right to vote is stripped from Black and Brown people, and when our contributions to this country are erased, is one that only reinforces the interests of the wealthy, white men who are architecting the great retrenchment.
With a dizzying level of conservative attacks on civil rights, increased attention to what is happening is incumbent upon all of us. It’s what keeps Brandon Tensley busy at work as the national politics reporter at Capital B News. He recently reported on a case that the Supreme Court refused to hear, regarding a prominent figure of the Black Lives Matter movement, DeRay McKesson:
“The high court on Monday virtually outlawed the right to mass protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas when it declined to step in and overturn a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been engaged in a yearslong campaign against DeRay Mckesson.”
He goes on to write about the greater significance:
“The high court’s inaction goes beyond Mckesson and protests. It’s about race, power, and whose voices are heard and whose are muzzled in our fragile multiracial democracy. It’s also part of a much wider pattern of diminishing Black political strength, particularly in the Deep South.”
Of course, the wide ranging assault on Black and Brown political power is nothing new. Dennie harkens back to the words of Frederick Douglass as the epigraph in her book. In 1857 he wrote:
“We, the people. Not we, the white people, not we, the citizens or the legal voters, not we, the privileged class and excluding all other classes, but we, the people, the men and women, the human inhabitants of the United States do ordain and establish this Constitution.”
The Constitution, she writes, is a living document, meant to be interpreted and adapted to the reality of our times. If and when the Supreme Court is out of step with the American public, we have the power to reject it.
“I think it’s important to recognize that the Supreme Court does not actually have a monopoly on the Constitution, that regular people still have the authority, the responsibility even, to say what the Constitution means to them. And so if they are opposed to what the court is doing… if they are disagreeing, they should still pursue what they think is constitutional,” Dennie says.
And that responsibility is evident on the state level as well. Tensley reported on states like Minnesota moving to safeguard voter protections in response to hostility and erosion of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Minnesota is the first state to respond to the panel’s decision with its own Voting Rights Act,
Tensley writes. “The existence of the law brings into focus how bleak the voting rights landscape has become over the past year: Conservative legislators and judges have ramped up their attacks on the franchise since last June’s U.S. Supreme Court decision…”
The state level continues to be a pivotal place for community building and social change. Tensley reminded us of the coalition of newsrooms, including WURD Radio, Outlier Media, and Capital B (all URL Media network partners) taking Black political power on the road:
For Dennie and Tensley, an antidote to apathy has been studying history and social change and drawing on the wisdom of our predecessors. Tensley invoked James Baldwin as we closed the episode:
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it. History is literally present in all that we do.”
And that’s Twice as Good. We’ll see you next time.
