I played monopoly only a few times in my life. I hated it because it was obviously a game that benefited the few (the one) and it was therefore set up to humiliate as many players as possible. I played it a few times, and I have refused to play it ever since.
I liked Kimberly’s video a lot because she articulated the reasons against racism well and was not afraid to show her heart. I knew about Tulsa (from school), not about Rosewood.
But ultimately, it comes down to what game we are playing.
One in eight Americans is African American. Three out of 100 Senators are African American and that is actually an all-time high.
More than half of us are women and we do not even have half of that half sit in all our seats.
By not having an honest system, the divided often fight the divided. Guess who wins?
In 1996, New Zealand changed its two-party system to incorporate proportional voting. The number of female representatives jumped by 47 percent in the first next new election. This shows real well how bad the district voting system really is.
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Our system is a demeaning system. We are segregated in voting districts where we fight each other over that single seat. That is pure divide-and-conquer, pure monopoly.
This is us, to the left. We are indeed segregated in districts where we have to battle each other for that single seat. We are playing monopoly in our own little districts.
Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented; they don’t sit at the tables of decision making. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to unrepresented voting minorities. It doesn’t matter if the voting minority is African American, young adults, women, homosexuals, the poor, socialists; when not in the majority, no seat is obtained. These large voting minorities are not represented to the level of their numbers.
To the right in the image one can see the actual We The People system. As shown in this example of a city council with eight seats, almost 90 percent of the voters are guaranteed that their vote translates into a representative they handpicked themselves. All substantial voting minorities are represented in this better system. Example.
We can try to make our neighborhood be based on equality, but if the city is divide-and-conquer, we will never succeed.
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When San Francisco moved from At-Large to district voting, the ugly voting system became quite obvious. Prior, in the semi-proportional system also known as city-wide, they had 6 men and 5 women in the eleven supervisor seats. After the change to district voting, the city had 10 men and 1 woman in these eleven seats.
The Democratic Party did their best to fix it up over the years. Wonderful as it may appear today, the Machine tried to quickly mask the divide-and-conquer system we have with a nice layer of We The People.
It may not be a surprise that the system was changed to the more restricted version. The Green Party had become a popular party in the Bay Area in those days, getting some of the seats in the region. Today, they are gone. By moving back to district voting, the Machine made sure that third parties wouldn’t get their seats. Today, all SF supervisors are registered Democrats.
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Let’s not uncover and discard the good parts of our society; let’s fix the ground rules that aggravate racism and ingrains discrimination of all kinds.
The good news is that the US Constitution is already demanding the We The People system for cities and counties. Here is a visual.
A: Federal and State governments are given powers and freedoms.
B: The 14th Amendment demands the better system put in place.
As shown to the left, Federal and State governments received #A from the US Constitution and unfortunately they can use this to create themselves some leeway with #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and yet they must fully abide by the highest document of the nation.
States did not receive the power to hand power to third parties within that extends their right to ignore #B to the same level.
Cities and counties must follow #B strictly as declared in the US Constitution. But as you can see in the same visual to the right, they assume to have those powers that they do not have. They perpetuate the divide-and-conquer system to a level that is not allowed. They should have the We The People system in place, per the highest document in the nation.
Racism may never disappear from the face of the earth. But monopoly and divide-and-conquer can disappear from the face of the earth, and that will be a wonderful day in our struggle against racism.
