Time & Perspective Quote by Eddie Bernice Johnson

Johnson’s line is doing two things at once: coaching patience while refusing to sanitize the problem. The opening, “I try hard to convince them it’s important,” sounds like the familiar civic script about participation. Then she snaps the camera to the real obstacle: not apathy, but a “history of discomfort with minorities voting.” That phrase is strategically plain. She doesn’t dress it up as “partisanship” or “election integrity.” She names it as what it is: a cultural and political unease with shared power.

The subtext is bluntly transactional: voting isn’t just a right, it’s leverage. When she says “them,” she’s hinting at communities that may feel their ballots don’t matter or aren’t wanted to matter. But she also uses “them” to point outward, toward the gatekeepers who set the temperature of democracy. The quote’s most cutting move is how it locates resistance in habit and generational memory: “older people have to get accustomed to it.” That’s not an insult; it’s an indictment of a system that treated minority political agency as an exception for so long that equality now reads as disruption.

Contextually, this fits Johnson’s career as a Texas Democrat shaped by the long afterlife of Jim Crow tactics: intimidation, bureaucratic hurdles, and later, voter ID fights and post-Shelby County rollback politics. Her intent isn’t to reassure; it’s to normalize minority voting so thoroughly that the “discomfort” becomes socially illegible. The line works because it frames inclusion not as a moral upgrade, but as an adjustment the country has repeatedly resisted - and must now be trained to accept.