A page from "The Final Rolls of Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory." Image from National Archives and Records Administration
Instead of financial reparations, scholar Theodore R. Johnson calls for a weighted vote for descendants of African slaves, a system that could be established by creating rolls like the ones used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal governments:
This plan should be temporally limited in scope, since the point is not to permanently install a historical equivalence but to erase structural disadvantages. Weighted voting could be fixed to some predetermined period of years, say 24, which is only about a third of the number of years the three-fifths compromise was in place. This amount of time would include multiple presidential, congressional, state and local elections, as well as referenda. Each elected office, no matter its term, would face several elections, allowing their constituencies successive opportunities to hold their representatives accountable. And then the problem of who exactly is eligible must be addressed. Would a biracial voter qualify? A black immigrant? And what exactly is an election official to do when Rachel Dolezal shows up to claim her five-thirds vote? The government shouldn’t be the sole arbiter of who gets to be black — nor flirt with archaic prescriptions such as the one-drop rule in determining a voter’s race. The most straightforward approach would be to limit access to weighted voting to those American-born citizens who have demonstrated through government documents, such as drivers’ licenses or birth certificates, that they identify, and are identified by others, as black or African American. There are bound to be instances where this approach is challenged, and one answer would be to model guidelines after the general requirements for establishing American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry as outlined by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which involve establishing that a lineal ancestor belongs to a specific tribe and then producing vital records that document a relationship to that ancestor. Granting reparations in this way would empower African Americans but gift nothing: Black voters would still have to claim their share of reparations at every election — a suitable settlement in a nation allergic to handouts. Weighted-vote reparations would require African Americans to register and turn out in order to achieve the desired impact on public policy. It would require sustained civic and political engagement.Get the Story:
Theodore R. Johnson: Instead of cash reparations, give every black American 5/3 of a vote (The Washington Post 8/21)
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