About Your Banging Blacklist: An Open Letter to the Civitas Institute [View all]

[octoberlib]

Dear Civitas Institute,

Thanks for including me in your Moral Monday Protesters database. I'm sure I speak for many of those arrested for civil disobedience protesting North Carolina's Tea Party legislature who are happy to find our name, residence, and employer are usefully listed on the Internet.

I'd like to thank your funder, Art Pope, for making this project possible and giving it that personal touch. Linking to our mug shots is a nice detail; otherwise, your readers might not be able to recognize us on the street. Also, it has that great Rogues' Gallery effect. I mean, everyone looks like a criminal in a mug shot.

You really enrich the picture by listing arrestees' "interest-group affiliations," such as NAACP, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and, of course, Occupy Raleigh. But maybe the best grace note is the column devoted to noting everyone whose driver's license address doesn't match their voter registration address. Could that mean rampant voter fraud? You report, we decide.

Maybe it's just because I teach Constitutional Law, so I randomly know all these little Americana details, but this whole project is a really nice allusion to those laws Southern states passed in the 1950s, requiring certain groups, which just happened to be the NAACP and other civil-rights organizations, to disclose their membership. You know, so that employers and neighbors could be informed, make their views known to the troublemakers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/about-your-banging-blackl_b_3471691.html?utm_hp_ref=politics