The 'Negro Project' and Voter ID

It seems photo voter ID and Planned Parenthood have been in the news quite a bit lately.  On Tuesday I gave a presentation at Duke University School of Law on voter ID.  I discussed both topics.  How are they related?

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One of the favorite canards of voter ID opponents is that voter ID is an intentional scheme to harm black voters.  The theory supposes since black voters tend to have photo identification less frequently, then state laws requiring voter ID are a deliberate plot to harm black voters.

Consider the nonsense of Virginia Senator Mamie Locke.  After the Virginia Senate passed voter ID this week, she called it “so 1866,” thinking she was describing a year where blacks couldn’t vote and whites could.  In fact, 1866 saw precisely the opposite.  White confederates were disenfranchised and freedmen enjoyed the franchise.  The reconstruction constitutions decades later stripped blacks of voting rights.  But in 1866, all was relatively well. Locke’s racially charged history is both unfortunate, and wrong.

As I said at Duke, I’ve participated in legislative efforts to pass voter ID, and nowhere was there any hint of a deliberate effort to harm black voters.

Regardless, the left goes wild over the prospect of racist conspiracies driving support of voter ID.

So let’s  consider the “Negro Project.”  This is a real racist conspiracy.  Here we have a deliberate plan to harm blacks, not just black voters.  You now know the “Negro Project” as Planned Parenthood.  As I said at Duke University today:

It would be like alleging that the abortion advocacy group Planned Parenthood got involved in the issue because they wanted to decrease the population of African Americans in the country, so they focused on promoting access to abortion and sterilization of American blacks. Of course anyone who knows about Planned Parenthood’s founder, the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, knows this is exactly what she was up to. She started the “Negro Project,” her words, and set out to sterilize large segments of the black community and supported abortion among blacks to prevent them from “breeding like weeds,” again her words, and to eliminate “defectives, delinquents and dependents,” again, her words.

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Maybe Virginia State Senator Mamie Locke can aim her accusations of historic racist intent at Planned Parenthood  and leave voter ID alone.   Hampton has a Planned Parenthood office.   Locke can summon all the usual race hucksters to picket, and demand answers about the deliberate acts of Planned Parenthood in facilitating hundreds of thousands of abortions of African-Americans to curtail the “weed-like breeding.”

Of course we know that won’t happen because imaginary racist conspiracies are so much more appealing than actual ones.  And some sacred cows of the Left get a pass on a nasty, murderous, and most of all, real racist history.

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