ABC’s ‘Black-ish’ Election Special Casts America as Racist and Rife with Voter Suppression

The Disney-owned network ABC aired an hour-long Black-ish election special that featured, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ diatribes about voter suppression, fallacy-filled rants about the Electoral College, and a plot that painted America as a bigoted country rife with voter suppression.

The hour-long episode began with Marcus Scribner’s Andre Johnson Jr. character preparing to vote only to find that his name had been removed from the voter rolls in a “purge.”

Junior was shocked. “I’ve been so careful to protect myself. I don’t drive over the speed limit, I don’t open anyone else’s mail, I didn’t even drink underage in college,” he said. “”Everything I’ve been taught about the promise of this country is a lie. From the founding, to the way that the electoral college disenfranchises people, to the way that even when we got the right to vote we had to pass all these crazy tests. Every time we have earned the right to vote, they have figured out some way to claw it back from us,” Junior tells his father Dre.

The frustrated Anderson scion turns to the Internet to find out what happened and watches a video hosted by Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, who says that America was started by slave owners, so the country has always been racist.

“That means that ‘We the People’ has never meant all the people,” the episode adds before slamming the Electoral College as filled with “538 people you’ve never heard of.”

Of course, the Electoral College is a representative system. The U.S. is not now, nor has it ever been a direct democracy. American voters vote for their representatives who form parties, and who, in turn, arrange the electors for the Electoral College. Further, the electors are our fellow citizens from our districts.

Watch below via MRC: 

The episode also incorrectly claims that the Electoral College was “started because of slavery,” and added, “The answer is almost always slavery.” But slavery only came into the discussion when the founders turned to figure how many electors to assign to each state. Slavery had nothing to do with its creation. In fact, the final Electoral College plan cut back on slave-holder power because slave states wanted to count all slaves for representation. But northerners opposed that since slaves could not vote. The Three Fifths Clause counted slaves at a lower rate so that the slave powers would have less power.

Next, the episode accused the U.S. Supreme Court of “gutting” the 1965 Voting Rights Act, something that in reality never happened. The episode accused Republicans of preventing blacks from voting with voter ID laws, killing same-day registration, and cutting polling place hours. Unsaid is that this happens mainly in Democrat-run big cities.

According to Black-ish, black Americans are having their vote taken away from them all over the country. But the true statistics show just the opposite. According to the liberal Brookings Institute, blacks have a higher turnout rate than other minorities and at times — in 2012 and 2016 — even had a higher voting rate than whites. Also, black voting has risen with every election since 1990, well before voter ID laws began.

Watch below: 

The second half of the episode featured an animated segment where Dre’s (Anthony Anderson) white boss decides to run for Congress because as a white man, “it is his due.”

But when Dre decides to run against his boss, the white establishment aligns against him and engages in illegal behavior to stop him from running against his white boss.

Watch below via MRC: 

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.