South By ... Tacos and Tired

As election season heats up, I headed to SXSW in Austin.

Capital B News’s Akoto Ofori-Atta, yours truly, and Vote Save America’s Shaniqua McClendon talked all things news literacy in this election year.

Hello! First, I was pleased to hear support in the State of the Union for passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As I get into below, nearly 60 years after Bloody Sunday, we’re still trying to achieve racial equality in our elections.

Let’s jump from SOTU to SXSW. I’m limping to the end of this week, but only because the beginning of it was so very fun. I spent several days in beautiful Austin, Texas because Crooked Media (the company that does Pod Save America and founded Vote Save America) invited me to speak on a SWSW EDU panel about news literacy.

The brilliant ladies pictured above and I talked about what’s keeping us up at night about disinformation this election year. I sprinkled in my tiny bit of optimism, media-wise. (Basically I think the media coverage will benefit from the hard lessons learned in 2020 about the importance of predicting how information will be misused and preparing the public for it.) We also discussed about how misinformation is the new literacy test, ways we can guard against fake news crowding our news feeds, and about how to respectfully report on communities that aren’t your own.

You can listen to the conversation here.

The panel was a success, which was really quite a bonus because the truth is you can invite me to anything in Austin in March and I’m a yes. For the tacos, the perfect weather, and time with my best college friends. But this trip I also had a book signing facilitated by Book People and met with UT Law students and professors about both State Court Report and how a UT Law alumnus (me!) ends up reporting for the WSJ and NYT, writing a book about voting, and editing at the Brennan Center. (ICYMI: I recently started working full time as a writer and editor at the Brennan Center.)

Which brings me to this schedule change: I’m going to start sending this newsletter earlier in the week, ideally Tuesdays. Next week I hope to provide you with a handy (and brief!) News Literacy Guide for Kids.

In the meantime, I’m going to think hard about something that stopped me cold this week. The Brennan Center has worked years on a report it put out Saturday (I had nothing to do with it!), that shows how the racial turnout gap for voting — the gap between turnout rates for white voters and non-white voters — has grown over the past decade. The growth is particularly pronounced in locations that used to require Justice Department approval before they could change their voting laws; used to, of course, before the Supreme Court gutted an integral section of the Voting Right Act in 2013.

Read the report here (short version: John Roberts was wrong), but the stats are wild; the gap between white voter turnout and that of Black and Brown voters is wide enough that it’s usually larger than the gap between winning candidates and losing candidates. Racial turnout is a deciding factor, basically.

It’s what voting advocates have anecdotally known was happening for years, but the proof is now in, well, black and white. Besides how incredibly frustrating the numbers are, I’m also bothered by this paradox: overall turnout rates are up. So if the racial turnout gap is increasing, it means that all of that success in increasing turnout isn’t reaching non-white voters in a proportional way. To me that means voting organizations and advocates (myself included) need to work real hard this year to make sure the outreach takes into account that reality.

Have a nice weekend everyone.

(PS: Myself and the wonderful Book People rep couldn’t decide where to put the “signed copy” sticker on the Thank You for Voting — I mean, Thank You for Votin’ —cover. This perfect spot she settled on will delight the Texan in me forever. I may have to buy a copy.)