Overtonwindow is referring to historical policies in parts of the US that were used to suppress the black vote. These had nothing to do with actually ensuring a literate electorate. White voters were often either exempt from the tests altogether or held to a much lower standard. The concern is something like wording the questions to be ideological shibboleths to let the "right sort of people" comment rather than checking for awareness of specific facts or claims.
This response is why such measures were so effective.
Many of the tests were so subjective they could simply fail anyone they wanted to. Especially certain groups who had just recently gained the power to vote.
if all the literate people were male and all the illiterate people were female, requiring literacy would not necessarily be sexism. you're conflating 2 different things. as did they. perhaps it did exclude more recently-emancipated black people. oh well. requiring literacy for something as important as an election is not obstructionist, IMHO
The fee you mentioned, however, is, IMHO.
if I had to hire a scientist for a job and the only applicants that were qualified enough were white males, hiring a white male would not make me a racist sexist.
i look forward to the day when people just stop trying to correlate everything both positive and negative to race, gender, age, and any other attribute other than "are you a good person" and "can you do this job well"
>i look forward to the day when people just stop trying to correlate everything both positive and negative to race, gender, age, and any other attribute other than "are you a good person" and "can you do this job well"
completely abstracted of the rest of history maybe that'd be possible. the problem is that black people in antebellum south were prevented from learning to read. so really it went something like: let's not teach black to read and then require literacy in order to vote.
>oh well. requiring literacy for something as important as an election is not obstructionist, IMHO
i would gladly wager that an overwhelming majority of voters don't read more than 10,000 words about any given election and get most of their data from television/radio/speech. so tell me why literacy is of paramount importance?
If it were universally applied, evaluated identically each time, and then used a clear pass/fail manner, you would be right. For example, the mathematical answer to "1 + 1 = ?" can be evaluated objectively.
But those "literacy" weren't anything even close to similar.
