(Todd A. Smith)
Asking important questions are great because I firmly believe that there is no such thing as an inconsequential question.
However, those that have lived in America for some time will know the answers to many questions before they even ask if they just marinate on it for a minute.
Someone on social media (I forget who) posed the rhetorical question of why can someone convicted of a felony run for the presidency of the United States, even though some states make it virtually impossible for convicted felons to even vote?
The answer to that question has always been obvious and in Black and White for anyone who could read the tea leaves.
For those that watch the news on a regular basis, the reason that question was asked is because former President Donald Trump has become the first former president to stand trial on a felony criminal indictment.
If he succeeds in his bid to win back the White House, it is quite possible that America could have a convicted felon in the Oval Office.
While I believe wholeheartedly in second and third chances, my believe system applies equally to the haves and the have nots.
Currently, convicted felons in Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wyoming could permanently lose the right to vote.
In Maine, Vermont and the District of Columbia, felons can vote from prison.
In all other states, the right to vote is restored after completion of prison, parole or probation, etc.
First of all, no one should ever lose their right to vote in America because everything that happens politically affects all Americans, incarcerated or free.
But to understand why a possible felon can run for the White House, but another felon could lose the right to vote, a person must only understand a little bit about American history and the role that racism plays when it comes to suppressing the political power of people of color, while maintaining power within the White community.
Stripping someone of the right to vote because of criminal activity is just another way to disenfranchise voters of color, particularly Black Americans.
The United States Constitution gives people the right to vote.
However, White America has placed hurdles up on the track to the polls for centuries, and disenfranchising ex-convicts is just another hurdle put in place to keep Black people out of political power.
Other hurdles have included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, identification requirements, limitations on early voting, limitations on voting by mail, preventing churches from providing transportation for their members to go to the polls, preventing people from giving out water to voters waiting in the heat and in long lines or purging voter rolls because a person missed an election or two and not informing them that they have been purged until they show up to vote thinking everything is kosher.
Critics of my above rant might say that it is not racially discriminatory to make it harder for ex-convicts to vote because people of all races find themselves behind those penitentiary walls.
In a country not as racist as America, that might be true.
However, the modern-day policing system and jail system was created just to re-enslave formerly enslaved Black Americans.
The practice was known as convict leasing.
Police officers would arrest Black Americans for imaginary offenses like being unemployed without the White man’s permission and sentence them to an exorbitant fine that many recently freed Black people could not afford.
When they could not afford the fine, a White plantation owner or White-owned corporation would pay for the fine.
But they would force the Black person to work for free to pay off that debt.
The White plantation owners and business owners would charge such excessive interest rates on their “loan,” that the Black person could never afford to pay off the fine, making them a slave for the rest of their lives.
And unlike slavery, convict leasing was not that expensive to get into.
Therefore, the business and plantation owners did not care whether their “worker” starved to death or they worked them to death because the investment was not that steep.
They would just go to the local courthouse, and pay the fine of another, often innocent, Black American to be their new “slave.”
If a Black person ever escaped their incarceration, their records made them unemployable.
Furthermore, the fact that they were now seen as criminal allowed jurisdictions to disenfranchise them.
Decades, generations and centuries later, how many Black Americans saw their rights stripped away from them for bogus “crimes” or the fact that the Black community is often overpoliced?
Those hurdles were never erected for people like Trump, his relatives or people that look like him.
However, if former President Barack Obama had a felony conviction, many of Trump’s most ardent supporters would have demanded his removal from the ballot.
A Black man from Texas named Hervis Rogers made the news for his determination to vote in the 2020 election despite the long lines at Texas Southern University.
However, when Republicans in Texas found out that Rogers had spent time in prison, he got arrested for “illegally voting” and his life became a such a living hell that he does not want to vote anymore.
Rogers thought he had done everything correctly to restore his voting rights.
But he did not do the one thing that is impossible and that is to change his race because that is the only reason America has stricter rules for some people and more lenient rules for other people.
