VRA Takes Another Anti-DEI Hit
Legal Construct Keeps Divided Social Constructs Down
What do you get when you combine one repressed minority with another? It sounds like a riddle from childhood. But it is a real court case, and one where two historically repressed minorities, Black Americans, and Latinos, got deprived of combining their minority representation into one mega-repressed group. It happened on voting rights in Texas.
It turns out whites are the dominant social construct that decided: No, No you two social construct we have come down on historically cannot claim together you make one. We get to repress you each individually, which makes it easy for us as the white construct to keep you in line.
The case helped to further trample the 1965 VRA, or the few shreds of dignity remaining in it. I hadn’t even known of this scrap. Disenfranchised, or anti-democracy, where you a white construct stop and block minorities from voting, has always been a dominant issue in American democracy. Rarely do minorities objecting to these loses, it sometimes seems, get to be heard in the mainstream media, to win in court, or speak up to call these decisions anti-democracy. It is, for sure, anti-democracy, but the white judges cannot be opposed with such defiance and disrespect.
“The plaintiffs in the case, including the Justice Department and branches of the N.A.A.C.P. and the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, have not decided whether to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Here is what we need to keep in mind about the idea of “social construct.” It is a legal construct. It was not that blacks were any less inferior when enslaved on ships starting the mid to late 1400s by Portuguese. It is the legality of making them inferior, followed by the combination of exporting them en masse to the New World, more precisely to Brazil to work in the world’s first sugar mills, that made the valuable.
Both the value of the stolen land, along with the value of the capital machinery of the sugar mill, and the capital value of the slaves, to produce the world’s first exportable, addictive, commodity crop to put in all foods, made blacks a social construct. It’s the usable, internal value of the black man from Africa, sealed into a legal work contract, that made the legal contract social.
Or anti-social. Extracting that value, and not paying for the hourly work from the black African, the white man and investors back home in Portugal who owned the slaves, sugar, ships, and land began to realize that value with each boat load of white powder return to the shores of Europe. Once the courts and merchant class got their mouths around this concentrated sweet, the wealth took off and the value of the commoditized assets building that wealth value of the world’s greatest drug became worth owning. As the 1500s ended, it became obvious to all nearby rival countries in Europe that machinery, free valuable land, and capital labor combined into an engine of growth.
However, the legality of it propelled it forward. The debate of moral principles — about stealing land, about enslaving people as two main moral problems — raged and some whites challenged the legality. But the moral stamp from the Catholic Church and the physical distance of Portuguese investors under the Monarch made the immorality of it easier to live with for those “back home” in the old world. The more unseen the slavery was, the easier to live with the increasing brutality became. An ocean separated the profits and the production.
It was the lawyers serving the state who made the titles and sales of the enslaved through those titles viable. The social contract made the social construct of blackness from the white owners. Today the speed of the internet dialogue and snap reactions fool us into repeating the simple and severe dichotomy of black/white as though there is something inherent and maximal. But color is artificial. It is only with the legal contracts and control of those legal contracts of ownership and right to use the value of a piece of machinery or an enslaved human is “superiority” maintained. Courts, laws, and politicians keep that superiority through intergenerational transference of knowledge and wealth.
This latest court case is only continuation of this unbroken legal construct of race. The shift to the word social construct is important and used often, but we forget it is control of the legal system that does the maintenance of the social construct of race. It was absurd to think in 34 AD or 1000 AD to think that the African empires and kingdoms were inferior.
Northern America was a part of the Roman Empire, and the Father of Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo, as descendant of Berber origin in modern day Algeria and a Citizen of the Roman Empire that constructed the idea of the Pope, the City of God, the “original sin”, and the “grace” of Christ, “the just war theory.” He is painted today in many works of art at a white man, though there were no white men and no English, no French or no German nations contributed to the establishment of Christianity — because they did not exist — like Saint Augustine did. He was Northern African, and the painters of New Europe changed not only Jesus to white but most people of Rome, Greece, and Northern Africa to fit their empire beliefs in the 1600s as they established their sugar fueled empires in the New World.
The legal contracts and constructs cemented the “right” to be superior and exert constant control be open definitions of what “black” means through daily degradation of flexible phrases. The legal power and control of the legal system has consistently allowed for not only the legal construct to remain but to make separated “repressed” minorities, legally controlled by the white construct to keep and to maintain segregation and disenfranchisement through such legal “decisions.”
This current decision is only one in a long line undermining the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which itself was not a victory but an admission of failure to enforce the 14th amendment for one hundred years, which itself was a reversal of the disenfranchisement battle before the Civil War, were states like North Carolina voted to change their state constitution to disenfranchise free blacks in 1835 while Northern states has enfranchised blacks and freed all slaves legally from 1777 to 1804. Every victory to empower black Americans politically yielded decades of legal disenfranchisement after. The fight between whites and black for versus unified white powered southern groups to continually disenfranchise is not recorded but ignored, because it stains the narrative of democracy from the start. How does your belief in democracy falter or change when you see hundreds of years fighting against the right to vote and the stripping away of it in states happen?
Not allowing two repressed minorities to band together is a fundamental problem of democracy and one of “both” these races. They have no chance of succeeding to gain political power in the Supreme Court should their case get there. The six conservative representatives of that white construct will keep it that way.
Texas went “backwards” in democracy. Since the 2020 Census, the state gained two congressional seats, and the increase in minorities has pushed the state to greater diversity. But the legal construct of the state made those two new districts white, actually adding “white power” instead of subtracting it. Gerrymandering by those conservatives in charge gave them more power, not less. By keeping Black Americans and Latinos segregated, they can try to draw Latinos into their fold, by making many of them feel “better” than Blacks, just enough to keep division alive.
By continuing segregating the “races” through legal decisions, and by controlling laws in the state capital that allowed last year the Governor to insurrect the voters and install his own superintendent in Houston ISD, the whites maintain control of the state, and thus the purse strings and the armed state forces of the state guard at the border, the police, and the state troopers, allowing them to legally undermine schools and keep them financially segregated.
Segregation, or anti-democracy, is common and consistent. The illusion of democracy by repeating that single word, “democracy,” is ridiculous. It allows the measurement of fairness to be defined by the white construct through the dominant narrative of “unity.” Unity is just a word used to hide division, facial repression, and conservative political actions that constantly erode sustain fair democratic practices from taking root. It is a claim that lies on a daily basis.
As long as the decisions, so obviously segregationist and divisive, continue to draw arbitrary lines, these arbitrary social constructs will continue to divide deeper and remain separated. Over the centuries since the motivation of legal reasoning created this social construct of black and brown by whites, the faces in power, the words of racial debasement, and legal parameters change, but the results stay the same.
