Georgia’s voting law critics miss mark with ‘Jim Crow’

The debate over Georgia’s new voting law has been deeply depressing to watch for a number of reasons. The first is that it hasn’t really been a debate so much as a lot of performative shouting from all directions.

The second is that many of the law’s harshest critics don’t know what’s in it, starting with the president of the United States.

“What I’m worried about is how un-american this whole initiative is,”

Joe Biden proclaimed in his first press conference as president. “It’s sick.

It’s sick ... deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work.”

The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and concluded, “There’s no evidence that is the case. The president earns Four Pinocchios.” (It’s the Post’s harshest rating.)

But that wasn’t the worst thing Biden, and other critics, said. The president called the law “Jim Crow for the 21st century.”

Defenders of the law say “read the law” or

“you don’t know what’s in it.” This is fair. The law isn’t immune to reasonable criticism, but many of its features are typical of many states, including ones controlled by Democrats. But if you watch these arguments on TV, you’ll notice a bait-andswitch. Defenders will note the ways in which the law isn’t that unusual. The response is to change the subject to Donald Trump. As former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently put it on ABC’S “This Week,” “If Trump had won Georgia, [do] you think they’d be doing this?”

Here’s the problem: Emanuel and others are right. Georgia is acting in response to the havoc of Trump’s sore loser schtick. But that isn’t evidence that these laws amount to a “new

Jim Crow.” Just because Trump indefensibly put Republican politicians in the position of needing to address “voter integrity” in the wake of the election doesn’t automatically mean what they did is wrong, never mind that it’s Jim Crow. You need to make the argument with facts — not just about the law, but about Jim Crow.

That brings me to the most annoying aspect of all this. It’s bad enough not to know what’s in a law you’re comparing to Jim Crow. It’s another thing not to know what

Jim Crow was.

Suppressing Black votes was certainly a central part of Jim Crow. But comparisons with the new voting law minimize the moral horror of Jim Crow. Under Jim Crow, Blacks couldn’t travel freely. Worse, they could be lynched, beaten, robbed or raped without meaningful recourse in the courts or sufficient protection from the law.

You can believe, as many do, that Georgia Republicans are using discriminatory tactics to suppress turnout in predominantly Black precincts. That would be worthy of criticism. But it still wouldn’t mean a return of Jim Crow. It would mean that the Georgia GOP has gotten itself into a panic that the state is trending Democrat and is acting out of desperation to stay in power. If the goal were real Jim Crow, Georgia Republicans would have pushed for it when their power was more secure.

Georgia’s congressional delegation has five Black representatives and one Black senator. Its state Legislature is 27 percent Black. The mayor of Atlanta is a Black woman. Do we really believe the state is one election law away from a system of legal lynchings and separate water fountains?

If large numbers of people really do believe that, “depressing” doesn’t begin to cover how sad that would be.