Modern Primate

Remember that time in history when a large group of predominantly white, moderately affluent young people were denied the right to vote? One Salon commenter does. In response to a story about Florida Republicans actively working to suppress black votes, one commenter sees how being a college student today is just like being black in the 60s.

IT IS LIKE FREEDOM SUMMER, FOLKS! You know Freedom Summer, right? It was the 1960’s and an equally well off group – African Americans in Mississippi – were being denied their right to vote for white supreme political overlords political leaders.

To fix this, the four major civil rights organizations went university to university to find college students who had been spared by the John Brown Complex (symptoms include white man’s burden) to come to Mississippi to aid in teaching people constitutional law – an understanding required to vote in Mississippi (at least for people of color). In 10 weeks, four civil rights workers were killed, three Mississippi African American Civil Rights activists were murdered for participating in civil rights (derp), eighty Freedom Summer workers beaten, 1062 people arrested for protesting, 37 churches bombed and burned, and 30 black homes and businesses burned and bombed. That’s all in the same amount of time that Intro to Biology is taught at my college.

This time around, individuals are being denied the ability to vote unless they carry a valid form of state identification on them. The horror! I’m sure that threatening letters like those that ‘informed’ voters they would be screened by the police and creditors before being able to vote, previously sent to only poor black neighborhoods coincidentally, will soon be sent to ‘dispossessed’ students (probably threatening that they will have to undergo a sobriety test or something). Also, I’m sure violence will break out on college campuses as hate groups known as ‘old people’ attack the relatively defenseless block of ‘dispossessed students.’

This Freedumb Summer will need MOAR VOLUNTEERS. There are so many college students, many of whom do not have enough privilege to find a state ID. They’re studying most of the time, anyways ;) . You guys, we should definitely take care of this problem before paying attention to any of those lesser voters…