NY Times & Georgia’s new Jim Crow law
I kind of want to start a new regular feature taking mainstream media tweets and news stories and rewriting them so that they have more journalism in them and less gutless anti-news stenography. Something like this tweet, from the New York Times today, needs a lot of work:
President Biden said he would “strongly support” MLB moving its All-Star Game from Atlanta. The executive director of the players’ union had said he was open to discussing such a move after Georgia Republicans passed a law to restrict voting access.
NY Times
Let’s try this with less subservience to the false god of objectivity: “[..] said he was open to discussing such a move after Georgia Republicans passed an controversial and unpopular Jim Crow law designed to make it much more difficult for black Americans to vote, just months after a surge in African American participation in the 2020 presidential election (and subsequent run-off Senate elections) took the Republican Senate majority away and gave it to the Democratic Party.“
I like it. I understand that my change wouldn’t fit into a single tweet, but I think you get the point of what I’m doing here. There’s more truth in my edit to that tweet than there probably is in the entire NYT story.
On another topic, Republicans like Tim Carney have been whining a lot lately about Democrats correctly calling laws like the one in Georgia “Jim Crow” laws. They are! Jim Crow laws were not defined by their racist bluntness, as people like Carney would have you believe. They were defined by their goal: impair or outright stop blacks from voting regardless of how brazen the language was.
That’s what this Georgia law does and it fits that definition well enough. We’re going through another era of racist Republicans trying to disenfranchise black Americans by filtering them out of our elections, for no other reason than to get/keep more whites in political power. Carney and people like him may not be racists (I doubt he supports Georgia’s new Jim Crow law and I know he disliked disgraced ex-President Trump) but he’s situated himself on the wrong side of things by choosing this dumb hill to fight and die on.