When It Costs $53,000 to Vote
In 2018, Democratic and Republican voters in Florida approved an amendment to the state’s constitution restoring voting rights to just about everyone with a criminal record. This was a huge shift: Suddenly, nearly one-and-a-half million people were able to vote again.
Jesse Wegman for The New York Times:
But within a year, Florida’s Republican-led Legislature gutted the reform by passing a law defining a criminal sentence as complete only after the person sentenced has paid all legal financial obligations connected to it.
And there’s no clear way to find out how much you owe.
Twenty years ago, Judy Bolden served 18 months in a Florida prison. She has been free ever since, but she is still barred from voting by the state until she pays all court fines and fees associated with her conviction.
When Ms. Bolden sat to be photographed by The Times earlier this year, she said she had received a letter informing her that her outstanding debt was a few hundred dollars. Then she checked the Volusia County website and learned that she actually owes nearly $53,000. “I was so taken aback,” she said. “I was like, What? That’s not right. I was just deflated. It’s like, when is this going to end?”
Ms. Bolden is one of more than 700,000 people in Florida who are barred from voting because they can’t afford the financial obligations stemming from a prior felony conviction. “It’s like I’m not a citizen,” she said. “That’s what they’re saying.”
The NFL Needs to Go After Every Jon Gruden
Jemele Hill, writing for The Atlantic:
The NFL has sent the message repeatedly that it is more comfortable with Black people as laborers, rather than leaders. Gruden could find an NFL team to hand him $100 million; the players Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, in contrast, both suffered professionally because they knelt during the national anthem in order to make people more aware of racial injustice and oppression.
Dave Chappelle’s Rorschach Test
Helen Lewis, writing for The Atlantic:
Is the story here “rich comedian attacks marginalized community” or “Black comedian attacks elite consensus”? That’s why The Closer is structured as a series of dares. Does this joke bother you? What about this one? Early on, the audience bridles a little at a joke about the Chinese origins of the coronavirus. Chappelle soon warns that it’s only going to get worse. Running through the culture war’s greatest hits, he dares critics to take unequal offense, and prove his point about a hierarchy of suffering.
And of course, some critics walked straight into the trap.
Rorschach test or clearly misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic? Roxane Gay argues the latter in a guest essay for the Times:
Throughout the special, Mr. Chappelle is singularly fixated on the L.G.B.T.Q. community, as he has been in recent years. He reaches for every low-hanging piece of fruit and munches on it gratuitously. Many of Mr. Chappelle’s rants are extraordinarily dated, the kind of comedy you might expect from a conservative boomer, agog at the idea of homosexuality. At times, his voice lowers to a hoarse whisper, preparing us for a grand stroke of wisdom — but it never comes. Every once in a while, he remarks that, oh, boy, he’s in trouble now, like a mischievous little boy who just can’t help himself.
Colin Kaepernick: Undeniable. Unstoppable.
I hate auto-play videos — can’t stand ’em — but this is dope sooo.
Sunny Hostin interviews Kaepernick for Ebony. Here’s the tease:
Colin Kaepernick hasn’t sat for an interview in a while. The football star and human rights activist rarely makes public appearances. He hasn’t spoken in depth publicly about his life; his adoption as an infant by a white family (and how that shaped him); or his longtime partner, Nessa.
Hostin asks if he still wants to play in the NFL and if he’s ready:
And just as the question escapes my lips, something in his demeanor changes. He clenches his teeth just a little. He sets his jaw. He focuses his gaze. Steely-eyed grit and determination wash over him.
He says firmly and without pause, “Absolutely. I am still up at 5 a.m. training five, six days a week making sure I’m prepared to take a team to a Super Bowl again. That’s not something I will ever let go of, regardless of the actions of 32 teams and their partners to deny me employment. The same way I was persistent in high school is the same way I’m gonna be persistent here.”
Billy Porter: “Dream the impossible, because the impossible is possible”
CBS Sunday Morning profiles the Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award-winning actor:
“The calls I’m getting now is for me to be Billy – the Billy that was rejected for decades. They want me to show up in my dresses, they want me to show up in my gowns, they want me to show up in my wings.”
A History of Modernity That Puts Africa at Center Stage
Journalist and Columbia University professor Howard W. French makes the case, in “Born in Blackness”, that Western ascendancy came about through its violent exploitation of Africa. Nigel Cliff reviews the book for the Times:
“Born in Blackness” is laced with arresting nuggets. It was news to me that the trade of colonial North America was overwhelmingly directed toward the Caribbean, “the boiler room of the North Atlantic economy.” In the late 18th century, white Jamaicans enjoyed an annual income 35 times that of British North Americans. French notes that more slaves were trafficked to Martinique, less than one-quarter the size of Long Island, than to the entire United States, while the French so prized tiny Guadeloupe that they swapped it for the whole of French Canada. The evidence that Africans made the New World economically viable is overwhelming, but in his zeal to press his point, French sometimes goes for broke. He variously traces a more or less straight line from plantation agriculture to the division of labor, productivity metrics, the birth of large corporations, the emergence of commercial credit and capitalism, coffeehouse culture and newspapers, political engagement and pluralism, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.
See also: Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world
Metaphorical Paintings by Calida Garcia Rawles Obscure Black Subjects with Gleaming Ripples of Water
Grace Ebert, writing for Colossal:
Each painting is based on photographs the artist takes herself […] and captures water’s incredible power and meditative qualities. For Rawles, the fluid spaces are metaphorical and tied broadly to Water-Memory Theory, or the idea that the vital liquid can preserve all of its interactions. “(I’m) remembering what water does, that it holds history in a way,” she says. “Water has everything that’s been through it, and that’s fascinating to me.”
Rawles’s exhibition On the Other Side of Everything at Lehmann Maupin in New York runs through October 23.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.