Thread by @JonahDispatch

This is a weird response, imho. I never questioned your intelligence. Frankly, I find the inference odd & the implication unfair. Lots of smart people are wrong about the points they think they're making. I would assume the architect of the 1619 Project would agree. 1/

https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1415300304044797952

As for my tweet: When Biden et al call the Texas & Georgia legislation "Jim Crow on steroids" or the worst attack on Democracy since the Civil War(!) I take them to be claiming that the essential crime of Jim Crow had to do with voting. I think that's ludicrous. 2/

The moral horror of both slavery & Jim Crow, again imho, was about the dehumanization, the violence, the cruelty, the denial of dignity and rights. Yes, one of those denied rights was voting. But on the list of moral horrors, voting was pretty far down on the list. 3/

Today we have Democrats, journalists -- including, apparently, you -- who think (and certainly suggest) that Jim Crow's defining feature was *voting restrictions!* I think that's absurd both on the merits and as messaging. 4/

Fundamental human rights aren't about voting so much as about human dignity and equality. I think those are more important and I think anyone who thinks otherwise on the merits is wrong for obvious reasons. But if it's not obvious to you, here's my thinking 5/

It seems to me the moral horror of Jim Crow wasn't primarily or centrally about voting but about the violation of the rights MLK invoked in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration -- equality before the law and most of all the right to life. 6/

Denying people the right to vote simply by virtue of their status at birth is profoundly wrong. (And, FYI, that isn't happening *anywhere* in America today!). Even so, denying people their human dignity or life because of their birth status is exponentially more evil. And...7/

Suggesting, never mind shouting, that the denial of drive-thru voting is equivalent to legally sanctioned apartheid (& lynching etc) strikes me as a grotesque trivialization of Jim Crow. And I have to say I am totally flummoxed as to how you could see it otherwise. 8/8