There’s a lot at stake this election. Here are talking points to help you create your own content around the election and discuss critical issues on the ballot that impact you and your community.
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Our vote is our voice but there are people in power who don’t want us all to have an equal say in elections. Recent attacks on our multi-racial democracy represent the last-ditch efforts of white supremacy to entrench itself in power by limiting who has it. Heading into the 2024 election cycle, we know that we must fight to ensure that our communities can make their voices heard at the ballot box.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the most significant victories of the Civil Rights Movement. It followed years of brutality against African Americans attempting to register to vote and those helping them, including murders of some. The Voting Rights Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against people on the basis of race or color and outlawed the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions used to deny the right to vote. This historic civil rights law finally made the 15th Amendment, ratified nearly a century prior, a reality. The Voting Rights Act was later amended to expand voting rights protections to language-minorities and to allow assistance to blind, disabled or illiterate people.
In 2013, the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Shelby County v Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the floodgates for mass disenfranchisement targeting Black and other voters of color. This past decade has seen the most severe anti-voter efforts by state legislatures since the end of Jim Crow.
Black and other voters of color have faced countless obstacles to make it to the ballot box under Republican-controlled states. After the election of President Barack Obama several states passed laws requiring strict voter identification. Black voters, elderly and college students were hardest hit by these requirements. After President Obama’s election states also started to reduce Sunday voting knowing it would stop Black Churches from holding Souls to the Polls events, where they would caravan to the polls after church.
After record participation of Black voters in 2020, many states passed laws to make it harder to vote by reducing access to absentee ballots, drop boxes, and mobile polling sites. In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state legislature made it illegal to give food and water to voters within 150 feet of a polling place.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis established an election police force to investigate alleged voter fraud, effectively creating mass voter intimidation. The first 20 cases targeted people with felony convictions who were wrongly told by the state that they could vote. Most recently, the Florida election police have gone to homes of people who signed a petition to overturn the state’s abortion ban, allegedly to check if they in fact signed it.
Congress must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the Voting Rights Act. The bill was last voted on in 2021 where it passed the US House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate. Not a single Republican voted in favor.
Racial justice is under attack across the country. States are rolling back progress made by the decades of intersecting social movements. Republicans have appointed judges to lifetime positions on federal courts including the Supreme Court, who are undoing progress. For example, in 2022 after the appointment of several Trump appointments, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established the right to abortion 49 years earlier.
For decades, conservatives have attacked affirmative action in the courts. In 2023, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on affirmative action said schools can no longer use race as a factor in considering applications. Because of the Court’s decision, we have seen an immediate impact as Black college and university enrollment declines for the Class of 2028 the Supreme Court. The percentage decline of Black students at each of these institutions is notable:
States are also taking action to outlaw affirmative action, Diversity, Equity and inclusion programs and banned books in an effort to undo the victories of the civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ movements of the past several decades. These policies became more widespread as backlash to the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Some call this the anti-woke movement while others say talking about racial and social justice is divisive and makes white people uncomfortable.
This past year alone, state lawmakers have introduced at least 39 bills meant to eliminate or restrict higher education’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in 19 states. Two federal bills have been proposed in Congress.
Public colleges are prohibited from maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, and training. The law limits “divisive concepts” (anything that says a race, nationality, sex or religion is superior or inferior or that any of those characteristics are to blame for actions in the past.) Recently, the University of Alabama shut down its Black Student Union office and an office for queer students called Safe Zone.
Public institutions are prohibited from funding the promotion, support, or maintenance of DEI programs; and from offering any general education course that “teaches identity politics, or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”
Public universities are mandated to end all diversity, equity and inclusion work including training for faculty and staff. Universities have shut down student support programs.
Public universities are mandated to end all diversity, equity and inclusion work including training for faculty and staff. Universities have shut down student support programs.
Project 2025 will take away and weaken the rights of Americans, including the victories of the civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements. It will eliminate critical functions of our federal government, including protecting our civil rights, environmental protections and regulating corporations.
Project 2025 will eliminate the US Department of Education. Without the Department of Education, the federal government will no longer protect students from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. The plan eliminates Title I, the federal money that goes to public schools across the country to support educating children living in poverty. It would also end funding for Head Start, which serves more than 800,000 students per year by providing free pre-K education, nutrition and health support for low-income families. Instead of funding public schools, federal dollars will pay for private schools and vouchers that will be segregated and unequal.
Project 2025 calls for the elimination of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs across the public and private sectors.. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division will be weaponized to end all affirmative action and DEI programs. Current attacks on affirmative action at colleges, scholarships, fellowships, and business programs targeting people of color have been brought by private actors. Under a second Trump administration, the federal government will also carry out the far-right’s white supremacist agenda. The plan even includes: “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” As a result, it would eliminate President Biden’s racial equity efforts that required all federal agencies to develop equity policies.
Project 2025 would make it illegal to mail or send across state lines abortion pills or anything used for abortion. The plan also calls for revoking FDA approval of the pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of all abortions in the U.S.
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of Environmental Justice, which protects communities of color from pollution. It would also weaken protections for clean air and water.
Immigration is a racial justice issue and racial justice is an immigration issue. Here are five things you should know from our partners at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI).
For example, while Black immigrants only make less than ten percent of the immigrant population, they are over-represented in detention and deportation. Black migrants are over-policed, put in solitary confinement at higher rates than other migrants, and are detained for longer periods of time.
The U.S. government has created multiple barriers to migration, and often these impact marginalized people hardest. This includes: Black migrants, people with disabilities, queer people, women and working class migrants (many who exist at multiple intersections).
The federal government as well as local governments and private investors make billions of dollars incarcerating migrants.
Immigration “detention” is incarceration that often starts with police contact.. Black immigrants are more likely than immigrants from other regions, to be identified through interactions with local law enforcement.
Black immigrants are 6 times more likely to be in solitary confinement while in detention.
For instance, Black Haitians were detained in Guantanamo Bay while white Cubans were accepted into the country as asylum seekers. Cameroonians had been seeking protection from deportation for over five years while Ukrainians were granted protection within hours of that European war breaking out.
76% of Black immigrants are deported because of contact with the police thanks to over policing, surveillance, over sentencing, lack of legal representation and other injustices within the justice system.
Police are the first contact most immigrants have with the deportation system.
Surveillance, a process of social control, has been a tool used to undermine and target marginalized communities including Black immigrants.