Disenfranchisement by Confusion
Jun. 29th, 2013 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenVia Slate, a copy of a 1964 Louisiana 'literacy test', designed to prevent minority citizens from voting.
Trying to parse some of the questions gives me the same headache that trying to read spam messages or deliberate nonsense like the Sokal hoax induces. There's something particularly nasty about assigning these people ambigous or meaningless questions like this purely so you can fail them for not understanding them.
It makes Australia's 'literacy tests' look almost fair by comparison - under the 'White Australia' policy, immigrants could be assigned a literacy test... in any European language. At least if you've been told you need to prove your fluency in Welsh or Basque, you know you're being screwed over, whereas this comes just close enough to solvable to make you think you're stupid for not being able to work it out...
Trying to parse some of the questions gives me the same headache that trying to read spam messages or deliberate nonsense like the Sokal hoax induces. There's something particularly nasty about assigning these people ambigous or meaningless questions like this purely so you can fail them for not understanding them.
It makes Australia's 'literacy tests' look almost fair by comparison - under the 'White Australia' policy, immigrants could be assigned a literacy test... in any European language. At least if you've been told you need to prove your fluency in Welsh or Basque, you know you're being screwed over, whereas this comes just close enough to solvable to make you think you're stupid for not being able to work it out...