“Political Apartheid”: Keeping Black Voters In Their Place
The Republicans who now control the legislatures and governorships in the deep South are using the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 to create a system of political apartheid.
No state demonstrates this better than Alabama, where in 2010 Republicans took over the State Senate and House for the first time since Reconstruction. This is a signal example of the decline of black power in the South.
Mike Hubbard, a Republican from Auburn, who is speaker of the Alabama House, engineered the 2010 takeover of the legislature. He was forthright in his 2012 book — “Storming the Statehouse: The Campaign that Liberated Alabama from 136 years of Democrat Rule” — about his techniques for displacing white Democratic incumbents:
“We needed to find our targets and the candidates to take them on, so I commissioned an in-depth study of voting patterns in various districts represented by white Democratic legislators across the state.”
Before the 2010 election, there were 60 Democrats in the Alabama State House, 34 of them white, 26 black. Now, there are 36 Democrats, 26 of them black, 10 of them white. In the State Senate, the number of Democrats fell from 20 – 13 white, 7 black – to 11 Democrats, 4 white, 7 black.
Once Alabama Republicans gained control of the levers of power, they wasted no time using the results of the 2010 Census to reinforce their position of dominance. Newly drawn lines further corralled black voters into legislative districts with large African-American majorities, a tactic political professionals call “packing and stacking.” Redrawn district lines minimize the potential of coalitions between a minority of white voters and a solid core of black voters. Under these circumstances, white Republican voting blocs remain dominant.
At the core of this strategy is an unexpected twist: Republicans in Alabama and in many other states have gone out of their way to protect black legislative districts and black legislators from Republican or white Democratic challenges.
Have Republican legislators in the South become civil and voting rights champions? No. They are promoting the interests of African-American voters in order to enhance the ability of Republican officials whose real targets, white Democrats, are struggling to cope with the steady decline of loyal “Yellow Dog” supporters.
To achieve this goal, Republican state legislators purposely keep the influence of Democratic-leaning minorities to a minimum in districts with white majorities. Alabama is a state where 80 percent of whites voted Republican in the 2004 presidential elections; 90 percent did so in 2012.
“The most important part of the plan was to preserve minority districts,” said Jim McClendon, the Republican state representative from Springville who co-chaired the Alabama redistricting committee. In a phone interview, McClendon rejected suggestions that the Republican goal was to make it harder for white Democrats to win re-election to state legislative office: “No, not at all. The voters are making it tougher on white Democrats.”
Out of a total of 105 State House districts, 27 have black majorities, one of which is represented by a white Democrat. In those districts, the average percentage of black voters is 66.4 percent, far above the percentage election experts now consider critical if the goal is to insure that minorities have the ability “to elect their preferred candidates of choice,” as the Voting Rights Act puts it.
In a federal court challenge to the state’s Republican-drawn redistricting plan brought by the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus, Theodore S. Arrington, a professor emeritus of political science from the University of North Carolina and an expert in election law, testified on Aug. 12 that 50 percent plus one vote would be enough in Alabama.
In redrawing the State Senate and House lines after the 2010 Census, the number of black “influence” districts – majority white districts with enough blacks so that minorities and a relatively small percentage of whites could together elect a Democrat – were kept to a minimum, and in some cases eliminated altogether.
Before redistricting, for example, there were five majority-white State Senate districts in which there were potentially enough blacks, Hispanics and other minorities to form an alliance with white Democrats to win in November. According to documents provided by James Blacksher, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the federal court case brought by the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus, these State Senate districts had an average percentage of minority voters of 35.9 before redistricting; after redistricting, the average percentage of minority voters in the five most integrated majority-white districts fell to 29.5. In other words, there was a significant decline in the number of majority-white state legislative districts in which minorities might have enough votes to form an alliance with still-Democratic whites.
McClendon, the Republican state representative from Springville, now plans to run in 2014 for State Senate in District 11. Before redistricting, the voting age population of that district was 65.5 percent white; after redistricting, it is 81.9 percent white, virtually guaranteeing a Republican victory.
In the State House districts with majority white populations, only two had minority populations exceeding 30 percent, 32.0 and 34.5 percent.
None of the 78 majority white State House districts falls into the racial “middle ground” with minority percentages in the 36 to 49 percent range. These are the kind of state districts most likely to produce biracial coalitions, and most likely to elect white Democrats, not only in the South but nationwide.
Arrington testified that the intent of Republican redistricting was to prevent blacks “from forming effective cross-race coalitions” both in elections and in the state legislature. “If you’re restricted to just 25 to 30 percent of the districts in the Legislature, and you have no ability to form coalitions with whites, then your ability to participate politically is restricted. It’s not participating equally in the political process,” he said.
Blacksher, the lawyer representing the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus in its suit, said in a phone interview that the Republicans’ goal is “to make all Democratic seats black, all Republican seats white.”
According to the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus,
“Republican lawmakers packed black voters into 27 House districts and eight Senate districts. The redistricting plans ‘purposely perpetuate and attempt to restore Alabama’s historical policy of segregating African Americans in party politics.’ ”
McClendon flatly denied such intent: “that wasn’t part of the plan,” he told me.
The Republican redistricting plan has had some unexpected consequences, with significant racial ramifications, one of which grows out of the state’s unusually strong restrictions on the powers of city and county officials. Alabama does not have home rule and requires instead that the state legislature approve virtually all local laws, including laws governing Jefferson County, which encompasses Birmingham.
The Alabama Legislative Black Caucus contends in a jurisdictional statement asking the Supreme Court to take up the case that
“The legislature enacted plans that place Jefferson County in 18 House districts, only 8 of them majority-black. All of the majority black districts lie entirely inside Jefferson County, but 6 of the 10 majority-white districts cross into 6 other counties. The 2012 Senate plan puts Jefferson County in 8 districts, 3 majority-black and 5 majority-white. All 3 of the majority-black Senate districts lie entirely inside Jefferson County, but all 5 of the majority-white districts cross the Jefferson County boundary to include parts of 11 other counties. Altogether, 155,279 non-residents vote for members of Jefferson County’s House delegation, and 428,101 people residing in other counties vote for members of the Jefferson County Senate delegation.”
The consequences are substantial, according to the statement:
“White legislators will continue being able to block local revenue bills, whose defeat has helped drive Jefferson County into bankruptcy and has closed Cooper Green Mercy Hospital for the poor.”
One solution would be for Congress to amend the Voting Rights Act to more explicitly address the political reality that African-Americans in the South are now mobilized and turn out in far higher percentages than was the case when the Act was written in 1965.
Arrington testified before the Middle Alabama Federal District Court that because of increased turnout, blacks in Alabama are, in fact, able to elect politicians of their own choosing in districts that are 50 percent or less minority – that the 60-70 percent levels that civil rights leaders called for decades ago are no longer required.
Changes in African-American political mobilization actually offer much stronger potential for integrated politics than in the past, when black political representation required supermajorities of minority voters. The elections of Barack Obama to the presidency, of Cory Booker to the Senate in New Jersey and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts clearly show that such biracial alliances are now achievable.
Republicans, however, will do what they can to prevent pro-Democratic trends from emerging in regions they dominate. After successfully winning control of the South, Republicans will not let go of the reins. In that famously vicious political blood sport, redistricting, they will exploit their ability to deploy the cloak of civil rights to maintain and strengthen a politically advantageous segregation of the races.
By: Thomas B. Edsall, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, November 6, 2013
“A Very Racist Halloween”: Beneath Any Standard Of Humanity
The holidays are often a time of stress and conflict, even as people engage in celebration. It’s always at Thanksgiving or Christmas that someone reveals a family secret, or when someone gets drunk and tells someone else in the family exactly what he/she thinks of him, resulting in the excising of said drunken relative from the will.
But who knew Halloween could also bring out the worst in people?
Two adult men in Florida apparently thought it would be just a scream if they dressed up as slain African-American teenager Trayvon Martin and the man who shot him, George Zimmerman. The Trayvon costume featured a hooded sweatshirt with a bloody fake bullet hole in it, and the man who portrayed Martin, William Filene, 25, was in blackface. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old, identified by The Smoking Gun as Greg Cimeno, was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Neighborhood Watch” on it.
The woman who posted the photo on her Facebook page (before making her social media sites private) is Caitlin Cimeno, and she is shown standing between the men. Cimeno, smiling, is fashioning a gun with his hand and pointing it at the faux-Trayvon’s head.
The bigger question – what is wrong with people? – cannot be answered easily. But one has to wonder what has happened to modern culture that people are willing to expose their racism and appalling insensitivity as some sort of joke for everyone with access to the Internet to see. It’s bad enough that they did it; the lack of any shame over it is even worse.
But then, Zimmerman himself seems to have trouble equating fame with notoriety. His lawyers convinced a jury that Zimmerman had acted in self-defense, so he paid no price for taking Martin’s life. Even if that were true, wouldn’t the decent thing to do be to spend some time reflecting on the terrible tragedy of it all? To spend some time each day thinking about the profound loss Martin’s parents suffered? To examine one’s own presumptions and suspicions, asking why Trayvon – wearing a hoodie and carrying candy and iced tea – appeared so suspicious?
Instead, Zimmerman has done a little victory lap of his own, visiting a gun manufacturer and posing there among the firearms. He helped a family get out of an overturned SUV. And he was pulled over for speeding in Texas, where he asked the officer who stopped him whether he recognized him.
We are sadly in an era when people are willing to debase and degrade themselves for attention. (Count up the number of versions of “Real Housewives” to get the picture). But debasing and disrespecting the victim of a terrible tragedy – whether it was a crime or not – is beneath any standard of humanity. One wonders what Cimeno and Filene have planned for New Year’s.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 29, 2013
“Bursting At The Seams”: No Tent Is Big Enough For The GOP’s Crazy Wing
The problem with a big tent is that it takes just a couple of people inside to ruin everyone’s afternoon by misbehaving, yelling or refusing the bathe ahead of time. And that is the very problem the Republican party is facing as it seeks to placate the crazy wing of the party while trying to present a more serious and dignified conservative front.
Both major parties have their share of malcontents and blowhards. Both have people who make outrageous comments or comparisons to get attention (Democrat Alan Grayson recently compared the tea party movement to the Ku Klux Klan, which seems an especially provocative comment given that we have an African-American president who might not see the tea party’s rogue actions as being quite on the level of lynching and hanging black men).
But when that element starts to define the party, then it’s trouble.
The people who think not raising the debt ceiling will not cause a default, or that a default on the nation’s debt would not create a massive global economic problem are not conservatives. Nor do they reflect anything in the Republican Party platform. They are either ill-informed about basic economics or are simply ready to win a war by dropping the fiscal equivalent of an atomic bomb. There is nothing conservative about that, and it’s an insult to the genuine conservatives on the Hill to characterize it as such.
Then we have folks like Don Yelton, the (now former) precinct chair of Buncombe County in North Carolina. Yelton gave an interview for The Daily Show in which he defended North Carolina’s new voter ID law – not because it won’t disenfranchise voters, Yelton suggested, but because he simply doesn’t care about the people who might not be able to vote. He told the Comedy Central show:
The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids too lazy to get up off their bohonkas and go get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.
The North Carolina GOP, to its credit, asked for Yelton to step down, calling his comments “completely inappropriate and highly offensive.” Yelton did resign.
The GOP can’t ask tea party members to step down (nor should it – it’s up to the voters who gets elected to office). But the party can make it clear that racism or serial intransigence or failure to recognize economic reality are not conservative values. No tent needs to be big enough for people like Yelton.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 25, 2013
“The Tea Party, Now And Forever?: That Cosmopolitan, Multiracial Man In The White House Is The Embodiment Of Everything They Fear
People (including me, I’ll admit) have been predicting the demise of the Tea Party for a long time, yet it has managed to stick around, the tail wagging the Republican dog even unto the point of shutting down the government and bringing the country within hours of default. Yet at the same time, if you paid attention to this crisis, you would have seen the words “Tea Party” escaping only the lips of Democrats (and a few reporters). None of the Republicans holding out to destroy the Affordable Care Act started their sentences with “We in the Tea Party…” It has become a name—or an epithet—more than a movement, even as its perspective and its style have woven themselves deeply within the GOP. Not that there aren’t still Tea Party organizations in existence, but how many Republican politicians in the coming months are going to be eager to show up at a rally where everyone’s wearing tricorner hats?
What this moment may mark is the not so much the death of the Tea Party as the final stages of a transition. The silly costumes will get put away, and the angry rallies may draw no more than a handful of fist-shakers. But we should finally understand that the Tea Party has metastasized itself within its host, even if fewer people use its name. It would probably help to come up with a new name for it, since the word “party” misdirects us into thinking that if it isn’t doing practical things like endorsing candidates or putting forward a policy agenda, then it’s fading. But it isn’t, and defeats like this one don’t necessarily make it weaker.
The time has come to stop looking at the Tea Party as a political movement and understand it as a psychological, sociological, and religious phenomenon. That isn’t to say it’s unalterable, and I do think it’s going to be politically wounded in 2014. What is likely to happen is a geographical winnowing, with its politicians losing where they were weakest to begin with. In 2010, many Tea Partiers got elected even in places where they weren’t thick on the ground, since that’s what wave elections can produce. But in the next election we’ll probably see the defeat of people like Maine governor Paul LePage—in other words, those who come from anywhere other than the South and certain corners of the Midwest and interior West. Tea Partiers will still win in Alabama, but not in New England.
The ones who remain will not be chastened by what just happened, nor when their numbers decrease. As there is after every Republican defeat, there’s talk now amongst the base about the need for more “true conservatives.” But if you look at the people who decided to end the crisis, they aren’t that different in their policy beliefs from the Tea Partiers. Mitch McConnell would genuinely like to repeal the ACA, and outlaw abortion, and slash food stamps. This isn’t even a dispute about tactics, because that would mean the Tea Partiers have some kind of coherent set of tactics in mind, beyond “Fight, fight, fight!” It’s about the apocalyptic worldview that animates the Tea Partiers. Establishment Republicans like McConnell have the same policy agenda as the Tea Partiers, but they also know that if they lose this round, there will be another round, and another after that. They don’t think that America could literally come to an end if they don’t prevail in the next election.
But the Tea Partiers do. In one recent poll, 20 percent of Republicans said they believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist. It’s easy to laugh, but try for a moment to imagine that you believed that. What kind of tactics would you favor? Would you be amenable to compromise? How would you look at even a small political defeat? As Andrew Sullivan argues, even for those who are a step back from imagining a literal apocalypse coming some time in the next few months, the root of the problem is modernity itself, and the stakes are impossibly high:
What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.
It isn’t just that they sincerely believe that the most uncompromising tactics are the path to victory, it’s also that they believe that adopting anything short of the most uncompromising stance is itself a surrender, before the battle has even begun. You can’t let the devil just sit in the parlor for a while and hope you’ll be able to convince him to leave. You have to bar the door. And as Ed Kilgore notes, this isn’t just about very religious people bringing a religious worldview to their politics; it’s a circular process:
It’s not just that these culturally threatened folk embrace their politics like it’s a religion. The actual religious outlook many of them espouse—whether they are conservative fundamentalist Protestants or neo-ultramontane Catholics—has imported secular political perspectives into their faith. They’ve managed to identify obedience to God with the restoration of pre-mid-twentieth-century culture and economics, and consequently, tend to look at themselves as the contemporary equivalents of the Old Testament prophets calling a wicked society to account before all hell literally breaks loose. So their politics reinforces their religion and vice-versa, and yes, the Republican Party, like the squishy mainline Protestant Churches and lenient do-gooder Catholic priests, are generally within crisis-distance of being viewed as objectively belonging to enemy ranks.
It’s true that this phenomenon is the latest iteration of a pattern we’ve seen before, whether it was the Birchers during the Johnson years or the militia movement under Clinton. Some portion of American conservatives comes to believe that the country has been infected with the most diabolical of viruses, and the normal democratic means are no longer sufficient to confront the evil within our borders. But by now we have to conclude that it’s been worse this time, and not only because the Tea Party’s forebears never got a fraction of the influence within the GOP that it now has. The threat of modernity that Sullivan points to is, for these people, all too real. The world is leaving them behind. And that cosmopolitan, multiracial man in the White House became the embodiment of everything they fear. Every one of his policies, whether born in The Communist Manifesto or at the Heritage Foundation, they see clearly as a rapier thrust at their very hearts. There is no telling them to wait for a more opportune moment to strike, or that the battle of the moment is one they cannot win. To lose is to lose everything.
So when does the Tea Party end? In the simplest terms, it ends whenever the next Republican president takes office. When that happens, there will be no more government shutdowns, no more cries of Washington tyranny, no more debt ceiling standoffs, no more Republican obsession with deficits. The tricorner hats will be put away. But the fears and resentments that created and sustained the Tea Party will fester, waiting until the next Democratic presidency to burst out. And it will begin all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 18, 2013
“Deep Seated Racial Antagonism”: Tea Partiers React With Fury To A World They Can’t Control
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many pundits and political observers were eager to expunge the nation’s brutal and long-running history of stark racial oppression. They spoke of a “post-racial” society freed from the divisions of tribe, healed of the deep wounds that ached and bled along the color line for centuries.
Even those who were less sanguine about the disappearance of racism — myself included — believed that the election of the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of greater racial harmony and understanding. Surely, a nation ready to be led by a black man was ready to let go many of its oldest and ugliest prejudices.
But that was a very naive notion. It turns out that Obama’s election has, instead, provoked a new civil war, a last battle cry of secession by a group of voters who want no part of a country led by a black man, no place in a world they don’t rule, no home in a society where they are simply one more minority group. Call those folks “Tea Partiers.”
The ultraconservatives who have taken over the Republican Party are motivated by many things — antipathy toward the federal government, conservative religious beliefs and a traditional Republican suspicion of taxes, among them. But the most powerful force animating their fight is a deep-seated racial antagonism.
Don’t take my word for it. Democracy Corps, a political research and polling group headed by Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, has published a report from a series of focus groups conducted with segments of the Republican Party — moderates, evangelicals and Tea Partiers.
The report confirms that Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers, “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority. The race issue is very much alive.” It also notes that “Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters.”
Tea Partiers believe that the Democratic Party is intent on expanding the social safety net in order, basically, to buy votes. They see “Obamacare” as a sop to that alleged 47 percent of lazy Americans who don’t want to work, don’t pay any taxes and live off government handouts. And, of course, those lazy Americans are, in their view, voters of color.
One focus group participant actually described the mythical America he pined for this way:
“Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. … Very homogeneous.”
Democracy Corps isn’t the only research group that has ferreted out the racial antagonism at the heart of Tea Partiers’ radicalism. Writing in The New York Times, journalist Thomas Edsall shared portions of an email exchange with political scientist Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. Parker said that “reactionary conservatives” believe “social change is subversive to the America with which they’ve become familiar, i.e., white, mainly male, Protestant, native born, straight. ‘Real Americans,’ in other words.”
None of this should come as any great surprise. In 2010, a New York Times poll of Tea Partiers found that more than half said the policies of the Obama administration favor the poor, and 25 percent thought that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public. Their racial paranoia has long been clear.
If anything has been surprising, it’s been the potency of their hatred, the irrationality of their tactics, the venom in their backlash. But, as they see it, they are fighting for their way of life — their control, their power.
This is an existential battle, and they’re willing to burn down the country to save it from people of color. That’s why they’re willing to risk defaulting on the nation’s debt for the first time in history.
The only whiff of good news is that Tea Party supporters tend to be older than average. Their cohort is diminishing and will be replaced by a younger voting bloc whose members don’t hew to their antediluvian views.
But the Tea Partiers are going to be with us for a while, and it’s going to be a wild ride.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 12, 2013
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