Disenfranchisement Quotes

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time.
I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Those who seek to suppress voting today are either ignorant of the history or are, as I suspect is more often the case, malevolently choosing to ignore it...

To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can't convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters. This reveals a certain irony: Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to the currency of ideas.”
― Dan Rather, What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism

“Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“Ex-offenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have been taken away in a democracy.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“If you were to imagine a life where you had very little power, did not have a voice and things happened to you, not with you - what would that feel like?”
― Eleanor Macleod, Relational Depth: New Perspectives and Developments

“[Jeff] Sessions was "someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence" because, for him, it was an "intrusive piece of legislation." Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“The ACLU and NAACP went right after the core of the issue—there was no voter fraud. Therefore, there was no state interest at stake—certainly nothing that could warrant this assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. It "bear[s] repeating," they asserted, that Indiana had "not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana" and no one in the state has "ever been charged" with that crime. Ever. Moreover, when the bill was being drafted, "no evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the legislature," making SEA 483, at best, a solution in search of a problem.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from politics.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Automation, globalization, and increased education requirements - compounded by failures in government and institutions - have given rise to a generation of disconnected and fearful people. The number of men who have dropped out of the labour force and stopped looking for work has quintupled since the 1950s. The result is a form of community trauma deeply felt in many rural areas: intergenerational poverty, long-term unemployment, degraded environments, disconnected social relationships, and destructive social norms.”
― Lyndsie Bourgon, Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods

“Progress is our most important product, General Electric says, and I had progressed to the front door of hell when all I had actually been striving for was a quiet purgatory. And I did not find it strange that hell had a soft blue sky, a springlike air, music, dust, laughter, curses.”
― Charles Stevenson Wright, The Wig: A Mirror Image

“Having children is the greatest sin in this country, according to Madam X. After a series of experiments, Madam X has concluded that having children is a very great sin. Hate is an evil disease.”
― Charles Stevenson Wright, The Wig: A Mirror Image

“Because I work at places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and PBS, some people see me as a stand-in for the coastal elites, for the systems they believe have been crushing them down, and I get that. When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there. People rightly get furious when that happens.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen