Issues like basic rights for transgender people, protection of voting rights for minorities, health care for unavoidable illnesses, and the major economic retooling needed to mitigate the effects of climate change are 'just politics' only for people privileged enough not to suffer because of them.
It doesn't matter how important the issues are if the political system is so paralyzed it can't get anything done.
The USA seems to have devolved into a system where elections are like votes on those huge omnibus bills that rightly get so much flak - if you want to see action on the environment, you have to also support increased welfare spending, increased gun control, gay rights and any number of issues that have nothing to do with environmental policy.
Similarly, if you want fiscal conservatism, you have to support people who want to ban abortion, oppose any climate action, use the state to prop up religion in society and so on and on.
This is nuts. The two-party system seems to make it impossible to tackle political issues on their merits, and I hope the people start to organize around specific issues instead of around the current parties. Pick an issue important to you, maybe starting on the less controversial end, and I think you will find that if you don't mix it up with every issue under the sky, people across the blue-red divide will support it. Organize those people outside the party system, and maybe you can get some change going.
There is generally not just one side that has a meaningful investment in the resolution of some political issue. Arguing that the other side does not have a legitimate concern regarding some political conflict is generally not going to be very persuasive, and it isn't going to make those people go away.
That being said, I think it is possible to care very deeply about certain issues, and act on those concerns, in a way that largely avoids the political sphere. Trying to fix the problems we are concerned about by means of influencing the power games of elected officials is often very crude and ineffective. Sometimes influencing politics is necessary, but if we let ourselves believe that the only way to effect change is "shake the vending machine" of governmental power we will generally end up frustrated.
You don't have to say some community cannot vote, you can suppress their political rights by other subtle actions like closing voting centers in areas they predominantly live, gerrymandering district boundaries such that they are insufficiently represented in state assemblies, etc.
Early in the last century, poll taxes were popular, as well as literacy tests. There are a lot of methods to make it harder for people you don’t like to vote.
Nothing here supports the argument that minorities don’t have voting rights, and I think the fact that you’re trying to stretch this to include non-citizens says a lot about how honest the original comment was.
I understand how you could assume that these issues aren't about minorities, but they really all are. Each of these issues barely touches white people while affecting minorities deeply.
- Felony convictions: Black and latino men are convicted of felonies at much higher rates than any other population. In 2016, 7.44% of black people had their voting rights stripped for felony convictions.[1] Over 1% of all black people in the United States are currently incarcerated, compared with about .2% for white people.[2]
- DC in majority minority, with 46% black residents.[3] Puerto Rico in 98.9% hispanic.[4]
- Citizenship: Over 800,000 people have enrolled in DACA, mostly of Latin American and East Asian origin. [5]
They are ineligible for citizenship. Among those eligible to apply for Citizenship, many are from Canada or Europe.[6] Our immigration laws are setup to favor high school immigrants, who are far more likely to be white than the immigrant population as a whole. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means our voting population is far more white than our resident population.
- Disenfranchisement: This is far more piecemeal, but southern states routinely take actions that just so happen to make it more difficult for minorities to vote rather than white people. I recommend listening to [7] if you're interested, which covers a specific recent circumstance in Florida, with a few examples from other states. It's no coincidence when eliminated polling places and dropboxes just so happen to always be in Black neighborhoods.
Remember, the voting rights marches of the 1960s weren't about giving black people the right to vote, that happened in 1870. They were about how certain states had made it so difficult for black people to vote that it was essentially impossible. Sure, many black people vote in these states today, but that doesn't mean that they have an equal ability to vote. The measures aren't as strong as they once were, but they still exist.
Minorities are disproportionately affected by long waiting times. Minorities have to wait twice as long to vote on average. Examples abound of people having to wait 5+ hours just to vote in heavily Democratic, minority locations. Its an easy problem to solve - add more/better locations, more voting machines, more poll workers - but seems to be consistently ignored or even exacerbated.
Same for issues like diversity hiring and SJWs irritating well-running open source projects. I say this as a left leaning person. Politics and religion tend to divide people thus they have to be kept away, it won't harm anyone but self important non-technical idiots who think renaming master to main will change the life of oppressed people.
I don't dispute that, but also realise my comment is about the general population so inherently has to generalize.
I guess my reply would also be that in a well functioning democratic government people get to trust that those issues will get addressed in time, though that is also not universally true.
Well, when you have one side saying "count the votes" and another side saying "stop the count", it's unlikely we're in a well-functioning democracy. These are the exact issues at stake in elections: whether religious protections extend to denying abortion care, whether one polling place per county overwhelmingly favors rural whites, whether racial sensitivity training is itself racist and should therefore be banned from government contracting. These are from the last month. So it's fair to assume, with one side for and one side against, that while these issues might resolve themselves they might not to your satisfaction.
The history of the US shows that 'in time' means hundreds of years to get nominal equality, a hundred more years for that equality to be even moderately enforced, and continued harassment, mistreatment, and open murder by the state fifty years after that.
