Democracy, measured in years

From the PBS NewsHour, Jonathan Capehart commenting on this week’s Supreme Court’s decision regarding voting rights:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what killed Jim Crow. The VRA is only sixty-one years old.

When it was passed and became law, it was the first time America truly was a democracy, meaning that the words in the Constitution equally applied to all of its citizens, including African Americans, by giving them the right to vote.

Sixty-one years. I am fifty-eight years old. My mother is eighty-four. So my mother is older than true American democracy. And so for those justices in the majority to say that, oh, well, racism is over in voting and we don't need this anymore, I keep thinking about what Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent in the Shelby v. Holder case, which invalidated Section 5, the preclearance portion. And she wrote:

Throwing out preclearance, when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes, is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

And so for Justice Alito to focus on the elections of 2008 and 2012, when there was a Black man on the ballot, to say that racial disparities are no longer a problem, and then ignoring that Shelby in 2013 led to just a rush of changes in voting laws in the states, is to ignore reality and to ignore history and to drag us back to a time when America was not America.

[I’ve made changes to the PBS transcript’s paragraphing and punctuation.]