GOP using Black women as scapegoats
For President Donald Trump and his allies, Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were easy targets. They are Black women. That made it oh-so-simple for Trumpists to paint the mother and daughter, who served as Fulton County, Georgia, poll workers, as lawless and fraudulent schemers.
So as part of Trump’s coup attempt — Trump and his allies were actually the lawless and fraudulent schemers — one of his lawyers aired spliced video footage shortly after the election, claiming to show that Moss and Freeman had pulled 18,000 illegal ballots from a suitcase and fed them into a voting machine. They had done no such thing.
Nevertheless, Trump called Freeman a “professional vote scammer” and a “hustler.” Rudy Giuliani, one of the more, ah, colorful of Trump’s allies, compared the mother and daughter to drug dealers.
Throughout the nation’s history, Black women have been characterized as grifters, harlots, miscreants, sexually “loose” and morally degenerate. We are supposedly foolish, superstitious and easily misled. Hattie Mcdaniel’s portrayal of an ignorant maid in “Gone with the Wind” served for generations as the touchstone.
In his first campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan brought a modern revision to the malicious characterization of Black women with his constant referrals to a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, [and] 12 Social Security cards [who] is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” That reference to a single career criminal undergirded his largely successful effort to persuade white Americans that poor Black women receiving public assistance were, in fact, living large without working.
To be sure, Reagan also smeared Black men as similarly lazy and undeserving. He liked to describe to white Southern audiences a fictitious “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to buy “a T-bone steak while you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” For some reason, actual wealthy white grifters don’t elicit the same contempt.
The opening decades of the 21st century have brought notable changes, including the election of the nation’s first Black president. Black men and women alike have assumed prestigious positions not only in politics but also in commerce,
industry and academia.
Yet pernicious stereotypes lie just below the surface of our public consciousness and are easily resurrected by reactionaries who don’t care for the progress of the past half-century. Republican racism, which Reagan had barely concealed, burst plainly into view when Trump ran for president. The fanatic following that he attracted with his explicit bigotry and xenophobia exposed the toxicity that had been brewing in the Republican Party since the 1960s, when Republican presidential candidates adopted a “Southern strategy” of pandering to disaffected whites who were unhappy with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement.
It was no surprise, then, that the rightwing disinformation machine quickly cranked up to accuse Freeman and Moss of illegally doctoring votes. Testifying before the House select committee on June 21, Moss described the hate mail and death threats that followed.
“A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920,’” she said. That reference was telling — the early 20th century was a time when Black Americans were still subject to a campaign of violent terrorism. Clearly, some Trumpists want to bring back those days.
Trump and his claque also attacked white Republican politicians who refused to go along with the Big Lie about election fraud. As one example, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s GOP secretary of state, was subjected to death threats when he insisted that Joe Biden had won Georgia fairly. But Raffensperger was a prominent elected official with substantial power in election proceedings. Moss and her mother were low-level election workers.
Nevertheless, like countless Black women before them, they have borne the assaults on their character and their personal safety with dignity. Moss’ testimony was riveting as she relived the period of her life when, as her mother pointed out, they were targeted by the president of the United States. In any contest of character and courage against someone like him, they win easily.