Yeah, for ever, white people have had to be very careful about what they say and how they say it. But the president of the United States can say what ever he wants, how ever he wants and the media lets it just slip on by. What do you think?
WesternJournalism reports: America’s voting system is rooted in racism and laws that “unabashedly discourage” some Americans from voting, President Barack Obama told law school students Thursday. Obama said mandatory voting to “reduce some of the polarization” could be the answer.
“We really are the only advanced democracy on earth that systematically and purposefully makes it really hard for people to vote,” Obama told students at the University of Chicago School of Law. “There is no other country on earth that does that. There is a legacy to that that grows directly out of a history in which first propertied men, then white men, then white folks didn’t want women, minorities, to participate in the political process and be able to empower themselves in that fashion. That’s the history. We should be a society in which at this point we should say, yeah, that history is not so good.”
“That can’t be right. There is no justification for that. You can’t defend it,” he said.
Obama then suggested his solution.
“Maybe the single biggest change that we could make in our political process that would reduce some of the polarization, make people feel more invested and restore integrity to the system is just make sure everybody is voting,” Obama said. “Australia has got mandatory voting. If you start getting 70 or 80 percent voting rates, that’s transformative.”
“At this point, we should be at the point were we say, ‘You know what? We want everybody to vote.’ Because that’s the essence of our democracy,” Obama said.
The president did not cite specific laws, but in the past has opposed state-level voter ID laws. Obama spoke to the Chicago law students just days after Wisconsin implemented its new voter ID law for the first time in its presidential primaries. Voter turnout Tuesday was the largest since 1972.
Obama’s comments Thursday differ from those made in 2014, when he told Al Sharpton the enemy of participation was not voter ID laws, but apathy.
“Most of these laws are not preventing the overwhelming majority of folks who don’t vote from voting,” Obama said than. “Most people do have an ID. Most people do have a driver’s license. Most people can get to the polls. It may not be as convenient’ it may be a little more difficult.”
“The bottom line is, if less than half of our folks vote, these laws aren’t preventing the other half from not voting,” Obama said. “The reason we don’t vote is because people have been fed this notion that somehow it’s not going to make a difference. And it makes a huge difference.”