Apartheid is Coming
Republican cancel culture (the original and only real kind) now targets books – specifically books that might be read by impressionable young readers, specifically any book that in any way challenges the rule of white supremacy and hints that people of color may have any legitimate role in society above that of servant or slave.
Maus, which concerns the Holocaust, is one of the latest targets. It concerns Jews, whom Republicans are more careful to delegitimize lest they lose votes in key elections.
But, as the recent episode with Whoopi Goldberg shows, race is a societal construct. It is only as real as the ruling society requires that it be. Just as the Nazis created the notion of a Jewish “race,” and set out to exterminate it, now Republicans are working to construct another “race,” and to make sure members of this group are never allowed in any position of power.
The key piece of this strategy is denying members of that “race” access to the ballot box. In Republican-led state after state, laws have been passed to make sure that fewer and fewer Black voters are allowed to vote, either through ballot restrictions or gerrymandering.
Some observers connect this to Trump’s lies about losing the 2020 election. Republicans are obsessed with “election security.” But in the Republican playbook, a “secure election” is one in which certain people cannot vote.
Trump is just the smokescreen. This is a strategy planned long ago. And its goal is apartheid.
It has long been known that “white” people soon will be in a minority in this country, compared with people of color. What will happen to whites when they are in the minority rather than the majority?
Nothing will happen – if laws can be passed now to make sure that the new majority cannot have any influence on public policy. Nothing will happen to whites if they make sure that no matter how small a minority they become, they are always still in power because of laws they passed now, while they are still a narrow majority.
So in the next five to ten years, we will see more and more attempts by Republicans to restrict Black voters especially, but also Hispanic voters and others deemed unacceptable – Democrats, say.
Republicans will never be so brazen (that is, honest) as to pass a law that says Democrats cannot vote. But they will gerrymander and otherwise rig all future elections so that Democrats can never be in the majority anywhere, and therefore that the Republican program of erecting an apartheid society can be enacted.
You scoff. Scoff now, while scoffing is still legal. Read Maus now, while it’s still legal. A day of reckoning is coming, unless Americans of integrity arise and stop the GOP plan to make a new Amerika, an apartheid state.
