An Evening with Louise Erdrich ~ Virtual Author Event

 

I had fun attending another live virtual author event this month featuring author, Louise Erdrich. This virtual event was presented by the South Dakota Humanities Council as a way to explore Native American electoral access. 

Below is a blurb about the event:

Join National Book Award-winning Anishinaabe author Louise Erdrich for a conversation about Native American civic engagement on the page and in the world. She will discuss her own experiences with activism, whether through writing about or mobilizing in support of causes close to her heart. She will also describe how those experiences have influenced her fiction, especially her most recent book, The Night Watchman.

This program was funded by the “Why it Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation” initiative, administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

I enjoyed hearing Louise Erdrich speak, especially about her latest novel, The Night Watchman, her writing, and the q & a between audience members and the author. There wasn't enough discussion about the topic of voting for my liking, but a good event overall.

3 Books On The History Of Voting Rights

With the midterm election tomorrow, it seems more important than ever to vote in tomorrow's election. I've already voted via absentee ballot. However, my mind is still on the election and am curiously awaiting to find out the results of the midterm elections. 

In the meantime, I've come across an article about 3 books on the history of voting rights that look like they would make for great reading. I discovered the following article on Bustle titled, 3 Books On The History Of Voting Rights & Why It's More Complicated Than #GoVote by Maddy Foley. In the article, Maddy Foley wrote the following information:

It's become a common refrain on social media: You counter a post about a mass shooting, a police shooting, or threat of a devastating executive order with "VOTE" or #GoVote or "Oh my god please, I'm begging you, vote." It absolutely makes sense. According to CNN, voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election was at a 20-year low. Even in 2008, considered a high point for the country's voting history, only about 64 percent of eligible voters punched a ballot. But despite its public persona — voting as a right, not a privilege, voting as ugh, so easy, so simple — voting has long been an act clung to tightly by certain populations. And for others, it's often been held out of reach. These three books on the history of voting rights will explain why it's more complicated than #GoVote.

The history of voting in the United States is a deeply fractured story, one frequently punctuated by racism, classism, and sexism. Americans often learn in school about the suffrage movement of the 1920s. It's an easily teachable moment in history — of course women should have the right to vote! But it's also, in part, a story of white women succeeding on the backs of disenfranchised African-American women.

The Voter Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, is often heralded as a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. After all, it made illegal the common practice of denying or suppressing votes within minority communities. But Americans often lose sight of its course after the 1960s. We forget that a major provision, which kept a watchful eye over areas with a history of racially-motivated voter suppression, was deemed unconstitutional in 2013 by the Supreme Court.

Even today, voter identification requirements have sufficiently snuffed out eligibility for entire communities. Poll closures, combined with a lack of public transportation, physically bar people from casting their votes. Gerrymandering, the re-drawing of political boundaries to give a certain political party a numerical advantage, have stolen the voice of counties and states across the country. And we forget that for certain communities, the idea of fulfilling a civic duty for a country with policies and politicians who systematically chip away at your humanity isn't exactly a selling point.

Click on the very top link to view the three books about the history of voting rights!