The 15th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified 150 years ago, on Feb. 3, 1870. It prohibits denying or abridging the right to vote on the basis of race.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The amendment guaranteed political equality for African-American men. (Women’s right to vote would come 50 years later with the 19th Amendment.) That guarantee was soon honored in the breach because of the collapse of Reconstruction in the South and the accession to power of white-supremacist state governments.
By the early 20th century, black voter registration in the South had fallen into the low single digits. The 15th Amendment was a dead letter in the South, and it would not be revived in a meaningful way until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Jesse Wegman points out that the 15th Amendment has a central flaw — and the flaw is language-based.
Its words were cast in the negative. It told the states what they could not do — “shall not be denied or abridged.” It did not tell people they had an affirmative right to vote.
And that wording has made a world of difference.
In places like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio, Republican politicians pass voter-ID laws, conduct voter-roll purges and push other measures that drive down turnout among people who lean Democratic — especially black, young and lower-income voters. In the absence of an explicit constitutional right to vote, laws like these are harder to strike down…
“There are still many, many people in this country who think the right to vote should be limited in one way or another,” [Eric Foner, author of “The Second Founding”] said. “Step back, and you’ve got the Electoral College, gerrymandering, all these ways people try to hold on to power by manipulating the right to vote.”
(Jesse Wegman, “Why Voting Discrimination Haunts America,” NYTimes, 2-7-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Coerced Stability
Author Yi-Zheng Lian, a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University in Japan and contributing Opinion writer for the NYTimes, makes a crucial point in this article about Covid-19:
Of course, the virus isn’t Chinese, even if its origin eventually is traced back to a cave in China; nor is the disease that it causes.
It makes as little sense to attribute nationality to a virus as it does to attribute it to plankton. The corollary that Yi-Zheng Lian states is equally crucial:
Epidemics, on the other hand, are often societal or political — much like famines are usually man-made, even though droughts occur naturally.
For me the distinction he draws brings a moment of clarity amid the maelstrom of obfuscation and fault-finding that’s abroad in the world. The agency of human beings in epidemics, as in famines, must be recognized.
From here Yi-Zheng Lian proceeds to enunciate the following point about Chinese culture and support it with observations about that culture:
Punishing people who speak the truth has been a standard practice of China’s ruling elite for more than two millenniums and is an established means of coercing stability.
There are several handles to grab on this essay, prominent among them the themes of Chinese food culture and traditional medicine. Because it’s what I’ve least encountered, however, I was captured by the references to classical Chinese literature, including associated Chinese script.
Here’s a sample:
The sage [Confucius] took a page from… “The Classic of Poetry” (also known as “The Book of Songs”), a collection of songs and poems dating to the 10th century B.C. or before, and adopted a rule from it: “To Manifest the Way, First Keep Your Body Safe.” (明哲保身) That may sound innocuous enough, until you consider the fate of one of Confucius’s beloved students, Zi Lu (子路), also known as Zhong You (仲由), after he ran afoul of the precept: For trying to rebuke a usurper in a power struggle between feudal lords, he was killed and his body was minced. (It is said that Confucius never ate ground meat again.)
Others:
In the third century, the maxim took on some literary flair and a cynical didactic twist in an essay on fate by the philosopher Li Kang (李康): “The tree that grows taller than the forest will be truncated by gales” (木秀于林，風必催之). This, in turn, eventually gave rise to the more familiar modern adage, “The shot hits the bird that pokes its head out” (槍打出頭鳥).
(Yi-Zheng Lian, “Why Did the Coronavirus Outbreak Start in China?” NYTimes, 2-20-20)
(c) 2020 JMN