Commentary: Maybe we need some Ukrainians to come to Kansas to protect democracy
On the March weekend marking the 57th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights march in Selma, Ala., a morning news show host asked Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude if he thought it strange that President Biden’s State of the Union address didn’t connect the fight for democracy in Selma, Ala., with the fight for Ukrainian democracy.
“I was stunned,” said Glaude, who recently spoke at the University of Kansas, and is a founder of Princeton’s department of African American Studies. “It was an easy kind of rhetorical move: ‘Let’s defend democracy abroad and secure democracy at home.”
In America, it seems we rarely acknowledge the inconsistency Glaude alluded to — the contradiction between championing our ideals abroad, while not always honoring them at home.
While the Ukraine reels under an onslaught from the much larger Russian military, America rightfully rallies around the embattled country in the name of democracy. But many Americans — including some in Kansas — are also hard at work here suppressing voting rights, one of democracy’s most basic and most important expressions.
March 7 marked another anniversary of Bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful voting rights marchers in Selma. On that day in 1965, Law enforcement blocked the marchers path, trampled them with horses, and bloodied them with, among other weapons, barbed-wire-wrapped clubs.
This session, the Kansas Legislature has employed nonviolent means to accomplish similar voter suppression ends.
It has presented several obstructive measures to weaken voter turnout — from eliminating the grace period for mailed votes to arrive, to uprooting Black, urban voters and dropping them into a sea of white, rural voters.
Also proposed: A voter purge bill that threatens to turn voting rights into a use-it-or-lose-it privilege; banning all mail services except the US Postal Service from delivering mail ballots; removing a third of ballot drop boxes and locking the rest outside regular business hours.
Kansans and other Americans have figuratively linked arms with the Ukrainian people, standing with them as they fight for democracy, while seemingly showing little interest in their fellow Americans centuries-long fight for democracy.
Our bitterly divided government, for example, united to send millions in military aid to the country.
Yet the same Congress likely will not pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would strengthen voting protections, and legislatures in no fewer than 19 states have pursued measures aimed at weakening voting rights as well as our democracy.
Is it possible that some Americans care more about supporting democratic principles abroad than they do about democracy here at home?
Based on the slate of legislation here and nation-wide, that’s probable.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that protections for Black voters were no longer needed in states with horrid histories of discrimination.
In the intervening years, southern states and others moved methodically to limit voting access.
Kansas has joined them.