Lady Business: Voter suppression, filmmakers, and movie niches; Extraordinary WWII spies
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 114th issue, published November 1, 2020.
Voting Drama
I waited in line for 90 minutes to vote this week. It was dark and gloomy and cold, and the people winding slowly around two city blocks were (mostly) spaced out at anti-social intervals, but there was still something communal and almost celebratory about the evening. A street musician set up shop with his guitar, and did a brisk business in tips; a local restaurant handed out free hot apple cider and cookies. Strangers showed up to pass out Halloween candy and slices of pizza.
It still was a far cry from four years ago, when I breezed into the poll place downstairs on my way to work and voted after less than ten minutes of waiting. Which is a luxury I’ve always taken for granted; I’ve never had to wait very long to vote before. I’ve never had my in-person vote challenged. I did have an absentee ballot returned as invalid once, because I’d missed a place to sign one of the multiple envelopes it had to be returned in (which sure feels like a fool-proof and uncomplicated way to collect votes!). So I was grateful this year to have the option of early in-person voting, and multiple days to plan when I could most afford to spend hours in line. But I haven’t ever had to wait so long to exercise a supposedly-basic right.
And it could be so much worse! All I had to contend with was an inconveniently long line and the couple behind me ignoring the concept of social distancing. “We’ve been talking about voter suppression forever,” documentary filmmaker dream hampton told me this week, from the Harlem home of an 82-year-old woman who had waited in line for four hours to vote—and who, according to hampton, arrived at the front of the line only to find out that her name had been removed from the rolls.
“We don’t expect [that] in New York,” hampton said, “but these are all of the kinds of the ways that voter suppression shows up.”
There are plenty of other well-documented examples—from this election as well as from two years ago. I spoke with hampton, the Peabody-award-winning executive producer of Surviving R. Kelly, for a Fortune Most Powerful Women panel discussion this week with three groundbreaking female filmmakers. Another participant in the discussion was Jyoti Sarda, a producer of And She Could Be Next. Her terrific documentary on the women of color running for office in 2018 spends its second half documenting the widespread allegations of voter suppression that Stacey Abrams faced in Georgia.
The documentary does an excellent job of demonstrating the mundane but effective tactics fueling those allegations: One woman discovers that her grandmother has been taken off the voter rolls because her four-part Vietnamese name doesn’t match the records' two-part Anglicization of her name. People wait in lines to vote at their usual polling place only to be told that they have been reassigned to a different one, or that they have to use a “provisional” ballot—without being warned that they have to follow up in order for such provisional votes to count.
This year there are more demonstrations of what voter suppression looks like, beyond the long lines that kept me from casting a vote that, nationally, doesn’t matter. In places where a single vote might actually make a difference, it is unquestionably and deliberately more difficult to vote. As Politico—not a publication that can be credibly accused of partisan bias—reported this week:
Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as [President] Trump.
“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”
During our panel discussion this week, hampton mentioned another documentary she produced last year, BET’s Finding Justice. It’s a six-part series about systemic inequalities, including police brutality and the lead-paint crisis, that disproportionately hurt Black people across America. But hampton really had to lobby BET executives to let her focus one of the episodes on voter suppression, and its disproportionate impact on communities of color, she told me: “They did not imagine that voter suppression was dramatic.”
Lady Bits
--“Why women of color? That seems kind of niche.” The response Sarda and her team got from several potential distributors when they initially pitched And She Could Be Next in 2017. Fortunately they stuck to their guns, and the result—which is free to stream through Election Day—tracks a pretty inspiring and diverse set of politicians and organizers, from Abrams and Rashida Tlaib to gun-control advocate Lucy McBath and 19-year-old Chicago college student Bushra Amiwala.
--The third participant in our filmmaker panel was Sarah Megan Thomas, the writer and star of Equity and the new A Call to Spy, a movie which fulfills my wish from three years ago for more World War II movies about the women who fought and sometimes died spying against the Nazis. A Call to Spy, which was released last month, highlights just how extraordinary its three main subjects were (eg, physically-disabled American spy Virginia Hall literally escaped the Nazis by climbing the Pyrenees on a wooden leg), and I hope that Thomas and others get to continue telling their stories on screen.
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