Race, Voting Laws, and an Old Joke

July 30, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A federal appeals court yesterday overturned North Carolina’s new Voter ID laws. The judges unanimously agreed that the laws “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The law, of course, did not mention race at all. Neither did its historical antecedents – laws that required a poll tax or a literacy test. Or the secret ballot.  Yes, as I was surprised to learn, the secret ballot too, in its early days, was supported and used as a tool to suppress the votes of minorities.

The voting that we now take for granted – privately marking a ballot provided by the government – did not become standard in the US until well into the 19th century. The first presidential election where secret ballots predominated was the election of 1896, which, not coincidentally, was the first year without an election-day killing. Earlier in the century, voters got their ballots from newspapers –this was back in the day when newspapers were highly partisan – and brought them to the polls. These tickets were long and brightly colored –  a different color for each party – and the only way to keep them secret was to fold them up and put them in your pocket. But that was considered unmanly.

Some of the first secret-ballot laws were passed in the 1880s in states where women had won the right to vote – Massachusetts, New York – and wanted to be protected from public scrutiny and possible harm. The other states that went for the secret ballot at this time were in the South. This was the post-Reconstruction era, the era of Jim Crow laws. The secret ballot also had support from Northern states that wanted to suppress the immigrant vote.

Historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, interviewed on by Terry Gross NPR’s “Fresh Air” back in February, explained:

LEPORE: It was a way to disenfranchise newly-enfranchised black men. None of them knew how to read – they’d been raised in slavery, lived their entire lives as slaves on plantations. The real success of the secret ballot as a national political institution had to do with the disenfranchisement of black men. GROSS: So the secret ballot was a way of helping them get the vote. [Note that Terry Gross is so thoroughly modern that she doesn’t grasp what Lepore is saying.] LEPORE: No, it was preventing them from voting. If you could cut your ballot out of the newspaper and knew you wanted to vote Republican, you didn't have to know how to read to vote. Immigrants could vote. Newly-enfranchised black men in the South could vote. It actually was a big part of expanding the electorate. But people in the North were like, hey, we don't really like when all those immigrants vote. And people in the South were like, we really don't want these black guys to vote. There were good reasons for the secret ballot too. [It was] very much motivated by making it harder for people who were illiterate to vote. It’s essentially a de facto literacy test. [I have edited this for clarity. The full transcript is here.]

                       
If you could not read, you could stilld clip your ballot of the newspaper whose views matched your own and put it in the ballot box. But if you had to go into a booth and choose candidates from a printed ballot, you were lost.

But what if some Blacks might be able to read the ballot?

Some counties in Virginia, in the 1890s print some regular ballots. But then they print ballots in Gothic type - like, deep medieval Gothic type. And they give all those ballots to the black men. Its a completely illegible ballot.

There’s a joke that I first heard during the campaign for voting rights in the 1960s. [The version I heard included a word too offensive these days to use casually, so I have censored it.]

On election day in Alabama, a Black man shows up at the polls. “Sure, you can vote, boy” the poll watchers tell him, “but you know, you got to pass the literacy test.” The Black man nods. “Can you read, boy?” He nods again. The poll watcher hands him a newspaper – the Jewish Daily Forward.

“Can you read it, boy?”

“Well,” says the Black man, “I can’t read the small print, but I can read the headlines.”

“Yeah? What’s it say?”

“Schvartzim voten nisht in Alabama hay yor.”

The official title of the North Carolina law when it was proposed was

An act to restore confidence in government by establishing the voter information verification act to promote the electoral process through education and increased registration of voters and by requiring voters to provide photo identification before voting to protect the right of each registered voter to cast a secure vote with reasonable security measures that confirm voter identity as accurately as possible without restriction, and to further reform the election laws.

The shorter title was

Schwartzim ain’t votin’ in North Carolina this year.

Honor and Politics at the RNC

July 28, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

So far, the speakers at the Democratic convention have seemed much nicer than their Republican counterparts. The Republicans reveled in demonizing, insulting, and humiliating the people they disagree with. Trump of course, is the shining example, with his insulting names for his opponents. But that style is just a nastier variation on a theme that runs through Appalachia and the South – honor.

It’s not just Trump and the Trumpistas.

Maybe it was because I’d just been reading Honor Bound, Ryan Brown’s new book about “honor culture,” that I paid attention to this clip that Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs tweeted from the Republican convention. Ted Cruz had just spoken at a contentious breakfast meeting with the Texas delegation. Trump had already sewn up the nomination and many Texans resented Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump. Here's a screenshot. For the full 28-secod video click on the link.

Texas delegates argue pic.twitter.com/DqbTZeWy1h

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 21, 2016

The delegate on the left, a Cruz backer, tells the bearded delegate (Steve Toth).“You’re a coward” 

“I’m a Texan,” says Toth.

“No, you’re a coward,” says the other.

The Cruz supporter makes a reference to Trump’s statements to the effect that Cruz’s wife is ugly and that Cruz’s father was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald.  “If he said that about your wife or your dad, I hope you’d do the same thing. I hope you’d have some character to stand for your family.” A few seconds later, Toth responds to the earlier accusation, “You’re calling me a coward, sir.”

If you’d asked actors to improv Southern honor culture in thirty seconds, you couldn’t get much better than this. The central element in the culture of honor is reputation. From that, the rest follows:

• Hypersensitivity to insult, especially insult to one’s reputation and character or that of one’s family
• Chivalrous defense of women (so long as those women are loyal)
• Value on group loyalty
• Formal politeness
• Willingness to use violence to defend that reputation. (This does not make an overt appearance in this clip, but I could easily imagine that “You’re calling me a coward, sir,” being followed by, “Them’s fightin’ words.” Similarly, the Cruz supporter is implying that when a man scurrilously insults your family, you don’t then make deals with him. You challenge him. You fight him.)

The “coward, sir” line nicely embodies the aspect of the Southern culture that Dov Cohen calls “the paradox of politeness.” Cohen, along with Richard Nisbett, contributed much of the early thought and research on honor culture. Some of their experiments tested how men would react to a person who was being annoying and rude. Northerners showed their anger earlier on and increased their anger as the provocations continued. Southerners remained polite. . . up to a point. But when that point was reached, as Ryan Brown puts it, “Southerners went ballistic. Their reactions were so extreme, in fact, the researchers decided the study should be shut down.”

Honor culture extends beyond personal interactions. Its ethos gets written into l aws and policies. The most obvious examples are gun laws and stand-your-ground laws. States and regions where honor culture runs deepest are least likely to restrict guns and most likely to permit their use against other people. The arguments favoring these laws are always about protecting what’s yours - your life, your property, your family -even when you might safely retreat.

Those arguments rarely mention protecting your reputation and honor. And even in Texas, if you shoot a man for calling you a coward, you’re probably going to wind up in prison. But jurors, judges, and parole boards might be more sympathetic there might be more sympathetic than those where people are less burdened by the idea of honor.

Less Policing, More Crime?

July 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston


Does crime go up when cops, turtle-like, withdraw into their patrol cars, when they abandon “proactive policing” and respond only when called? The Ferugson effect is a variant on this idea. It adds the reason for the police retreat into “reactive policing” – criticism from citizens and politicians, usually touched off by the police killing of an unarmed person.
   
The Ferguson effect is a corollary of another idea – “Broken Windows” policing. That policy is based on the idea that if police do not enforce laws on minor “quality of life” offenses, serious crimes will increase.

The Ferguson effect has been blamed for increases in homicides and shootings in Chicago, Baltimore, and perhaps other cities. In New York too, the police, angry at the mayor, drastically cut back on “Broken Windows” policing starting in early December of 2014. The slowdown lasted through early January. This change in policing –less proactive, more reactive – gave researchers Christopher M. Sullivan and Zachary P. O'Keeffe a natural experiment for looking at the effects of Broken Windows.

First of all, they confirmed that cops had indeed cut back on enforcing minor offenses. In the graphs below, the yellow shows the rate of enforcement in the previous year (July 2013 - July 2014) when New York cops were not quite so angry at the mayor. The orange line shows the next year. The cutback in enforcement is clear. The orange line dips drastically; the police really did stop making arrests for quality-of-life offenses.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Note also that even after the big dip, enforcement levels for the rest of the year remained below those of the previous year, especially in non-White neighborhoods.

Sullivan and O’Keeffe also looked at reported crime to see if the decreased enforcement had emboldened the bad guys as the Ferguson hypothesis would predict. The dark blue line shows rates for the year that included the police cutback; the light blue line shows the previous year.

No Ferguson effect. The crime rates in those winter weeks of reduced policing and after look very much like the crime rates of the year before.

It may be that a few weeks is not enough time for a change in policing to affect serious crime. Certainly, Broken Windows theorists would argue that what attracts predatory criminals to an area is not a low number of arrests but rather the overall sense that this is a place were bad behavior goes unrestrained. Changing the overall character of a neighborhood – for better or worse – takes more than a few weeks.

I have the impression that many people, when they think about crime, use a sort of cops-and-robbers model: cops prevent crime and catch criminals; the more active the cops, the less active the criminals. There may be some truth in that model, but the New York data shows that the connection between policing and crime is not so immediate or direct.


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Sullivan and O’Keeffe have written up their research in the Monkey Cage section of the Washington Post website (here). I have copied their graphs. I do not know if their work has been published in any peer-reviewed journal.

Police-Speak, Again

July 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A recent post (here) noted that police departments often resort to contorted and vague language rather than say that a cop shot someone. “An officer-involved shooting occurred.”
The Washington Post this morning has this story.

The the man sitting up is autistic. He wandered away from his assisted living facility. The Black man lying on the ground is a therapist there and was trying to bring him back. The police showed up, heavily armed. The Black man lay on the ground, hands raised, and tried to tell the autistic man to do the same. He also shouted to the cops that the autistic man was holding a toy truck, not a gun.


One of the cops shot the Black man. Or as the statement from the North Miami PD put it,

“At some point during the on-scene negotiation, one of the responding officers discharged his weapon, striking the employee of the [assisted living facility].”

As someone (OK, it was me) tweeted, “I discharged my weapon striking the sheriff, but I did not discharge my weapon striking the deputy.”

Language is one of the less important aspects of this incident, but the other important details have not yet been reported, We do know that the bullet hit the man in the leg, that the police handcuffed him and kept him on the ground, still bleeding according to the Post, for twenty minutes.