The U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld voting restrictions in Arizona in a 6-3 vote split down partisan lines, amid a surge in voter suppression bills in nearly every state. This suite of bills—tallied up as high as 389 bills in forty-eight states, combined with eighty-one anti-protest bills in thirty-four states—are steadily entrenching the power of Republicans.
In response, UNITE HERE, an international union of hospitality, restaurant, airport, and entertainment venue workers, together with Black voting rights activists organized by Black Voters Matter, have hit the campaign trail to fight back and demand passage of For the People Act to strengthen voting rights, limit the influence of money in political campaigning, and secure statehood for Washington, D.C.
“We are fighting to make our state, like our workplaces, better.”
Traveling from twenty-one states in a week-long caravan known as the “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights” to the nation’s capital, these newly minted Freedom Riders departed from Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, on June 19 as part of the sixtieth anniversary commemorating the original Freedom Rides of 1961 to the Jim Crow South.
Among the red-shirted UNITE HERE Freedom Riders were battle-harden Arizona workers of color who hit the pavement to get the vote out for Joe Biden in the presidential contest and later traveled east to Georgia for the Senate run-off election to secure victories for Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock.
All told, these activists were instrumental in delivering 10,457 votes that catapulted Biden to victory in the state, door-knocking and fixing incorrectly filled ballots of those who stayed at home fearful of catching the deadly virus in a plague-year (Arizona made the list of states suffering one of the worst outbreaks). That was impressive enough, and a calculated risk that was informed by epidemiological research and strict safety protocols, but especially so considering jobs in hospitality were decimated with 98 percent of the union’s members laid off, a rate which currently stands at 65 percent, according to union staff.
Sneakers still laced up, UNITE HERE member Marilyn Wilbur had traveled on June 26 from Arizona and now stood on a grassy patch of the National Mall with the U.S. Capitol perfectly framed in high relief behind her. Wilbur had come to deliver a message to Congress, especially Senator Kyrsten Sinema who won her seat in Congress in 2018 thanks to UNITE HERE members like Wilbur knocking on doors for her candidacy.
“I didn’t fight for this country and give a blank check for [rest of] my life for them to take away my right to vote and dictate how I vote,” said Wilbur, an eighteen-year Air Force veteran, enveloped in a sea of UNITE HERE members wearing red sweatshirts, adding that the filibuster must be reformed or scrapped altogether.
A similar conviction animates twenty-three-year-old Marisela Mares from the same UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents workers in both Southern California and Arizona. Speaking on the phone after the Supreme Court ruling, Mares draws on Arizona’s long history of voter suppression and says these machinations have left her resolutely committed to fighting back at every turn.
“That’s only ever made us stronger because we consistently play by their rules, and we consistently win,” Mares says about the roadblocks Republicans in her state have thrown up to democratic participation.
Mares also draws parallels between the fight against unscrupulous employers and Republican chicanery.
“At the end of the day, we fight the boss,” she says. “As working-class, as a community of immigrants, as young people, we have to come together to fight the boss. Last year, Donald Trump was the boss. Like an anti-union campaign, he fought tooth and nail to stay as President.”
In June 2020, Mares was on the organizing committee that won recognition for her and her co-workers as a union at Arizona State University in Tempe. She describes leaving the negotiations after sitting across from management and then going out hitting the doors to canvas for Joe Biden.
“We are fighting to make our state, like our workplaces, better. Republicans want to paint the story that the work we do in my union or in the community as reaching for a power grab or [characterizing us] as voter harvesters or [saying look] they’re committing voter fraud. No, we just don’t agree with the policies that they enact that come back and hurt us,” she says.
As a fourteen-year-old high schooler, before transitioning to a woman, Mares’s first organizing efforts were precisely trained on fighting back against draconian policies like SB 1070 that “hurt us.” The SB 1070 state law codified ethnic profiling by formalizing discrimination against any Latinx person suspected of being in the United States without authorization.
“When SB 1070 passed, my grandparents had to self-deport. Even then, ICE and the Sheriff’s Office still came looking and raided my house to deport my grandfather,” Mares said about the searing experience that politicized her.
Like SB 1070, the latest battery of voter suppression bills is no accident. They follow a pattern by Republicans and allied groups of ingraining white supremacy into state law. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was behind the model legislation that became SB 1070 as well as the Stand Your Ground law used to justify the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida and other model Voter ID bills, according to journalist Brendan O’Connor’s book Blood Red Lines.
Photo courtesy UNITE HERE
The latest culture war over the teaching of “critical race theory” targets any discussion of racism or sexism in schools as tantamount to Marxist indoctrination. Laws are already on the books in Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory and other so-called divisive topics, with lawmakers in Missouri outlawing what the amendment’s author describes in a Facebook post as the “erroneous and hate-filled 1619 Project.”
While treated as a separate issue in most news stories, the culture war panic is also part and parcel of a rightwing coordinated disinformation campaign that includes both the flurry of voter suppression bills and fealty to the filibuster, which serves as a totemic reminder that any mention of bipartisanship is a con.
From 1877 to 1964, the filibuster was deployed exclusively to stop civil rights bills, according to Adam Jentleson’s book Kill Switch. The filibuster’s central role as a weapon of white supremacy is well-documented, including the way South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun used the storied tactic of an aggrieved white minority to protect slavery and subvert federal laws seeking to abolish the peculiar institution and uphold the rights of enslaved African Americans.
The recent slew of “culture war” attacks is a proxy for white resentment about real or perceived shifting relations of power.
The Freedom Ride for Voting Right bus caravan came amid a resurgence of white nationalist hatred inflamed by racist fears of immigrants that culminated in former President Donald Trump inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6. These fears have loomed large in places where immigrants are growing in number while the white population is declining, as reporting from The Washington Post and The New York Times indicates.
“And since the 2020 elections, they have come after us, because they are trying to snuff and take our power away,” said Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23, during the June 26 rally. “I grew up in a Louisiana little country town surrounded by sugar cane. We’re familiar with us having to take a step back or being stepped on. But, look, even in spite of that, today in 2021, we’re still here. We’re still marching on, and we ain’t going nowhere.”