Fair Game

...That is no reason, however, to ignore die invidious nature of the decision...

...One way is to console oneself with the reasoning that a racial ailment requires a racial remedy...

...The Voting Rights Law was an effort to stop Southern states from depriving black voters of the franchise by all manner of coercion and trickery...

...That seems to me as it should be?but then I do not interpret the Constitution as entitling any religious, ethnic or racial group to an assembly district that it can call its own...

...In Selma, Alabama, to cite the most egregious example, after four years of litigation the number of black voters rose from 156 to only 383, although there were some 15,000 blacks of voting age in the county...

...Justice Byron White, joined by Justices John Stevens and William Rehnquist, framed his approval this way: "There is no doubt that the state deliberately used race in a purposeful manner...

...The best argument for racial quotas in employment and college admissions is that no other remedy seems to work so fast...

...New York's fault in the eyes of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Justice Department was, to put it baldly, that blacks had not been grouped in sufficient numbers to assure black politicians more seats than they already held...

...When it rejected New York State's 1972 redistricting plan for Brooklyn, the U.S...

...The noble goal of "one man, one vote" was reduced to "one favored minority, several seats in the state legislature...

...In all likelihood, the High Court's lack of enthusiasm for what happened in Brooklyn will deter lesser courts from finding too much of a precedent here...

...Of course...

...Justice William Brennan, the Burger Court's main link to the Warren Court, did express some uneasiness: "We cannot well ignore the social reality that even a benign policy of assignment of race is viewed as unjust by many in our society, especially by those individuals who are adversely affected by a given classification...

...Lightfoot, the Supreme Court told the white city fathers of Tuskegee, Alabama, that they could not redefine the boundaries of their city from a square to an irregular 28-sided figure resembling a sea horse to rid themselves of black voters...

...Chosen Minority The government's solicitude in this case did not apply to most minorities...

...For redistricting purposes, the state pretended that the political interests of black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers were so similar that the two groups could sensibly be lumped together in order to achieve the 65 per cent quota...

...In the famous 1960 apportionment case of Gomillion vs...

...This kind of squirming carried the day...

...The other, added by those who have more difficulty in swallowing "benign" gerrymandering, is to take comfort from the fact that the justices were so divided that the case is not likely to prove a precedent...

...The other seven justices found narrow grounds for approving the decision, but not the same grounds...

...That celebrated law, it is now necessary to recall, was inspired by the Federal government's inability to eliminate discriminatory habits in the South...

...Puerto Rican spokesmen were not pleased...

...the law gets turned into a weapon for political advantage...

...Like other racial, ethnic and religious groups, they have learned to play the political game, and it is to their advantage, or at any rate to the advantage of the professional politicians among them, to form solid constituencies...

...group antagonism is exacerbated by official agencies...

...Consider: The Federal government, formerly a champion of an integrated society, forces a state to institutionalize separatism...

...Fair Game by WALTER GOODMAN Racial Gerrymandering LIBERAL commentators have found two ways to deal with the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the government-ordered reapportionment of several Brooklyn state senate and assembly districts to assure their having a majority of black and Puerto Rican voters...

...As Justice Frankfurter wrote, "—the inescapable human effect of this essay in geometry and geography is to despoil colored citizens, and only colored citizens, of their theretofore enjoyed voting rights...

...Part of the problem was that many did not exercise it, and so to play safe the state not only caved in to Federal power without a struggle but decided that a black majority of 65 per cent instead of, say, 55 per cent in given districts, was needed for the desired result...

...Yet is it wholesome for the U. S. Government to imitate the methods of the backroom pols, and not merely perpetuate gerrymandering but actually lay down rales that determine the outcome...

...The two views have merit, despite an implicit contradiction: If racial remedies are in fact desirable, then surely this case would make an admirable precedent...

...The side effects are nonetheless troublesome...

...Justice Department was exercising authority derived from the Voting Rights Act of 1965...

...The Hasidim, along with other religious and ethnic groups, are not entitled to be treated as a bloc by the Voting Rights Act...

...Racial gerrymandering was flatly unacceptable to the Court—then...

...But its plan represented no racial slur with respect to whites or any other race...

...As individuals, black citizens had an unencumbered right to vote if they cared to exercise it...

...But now we find the Justice Department insisting on "benign" racial gerrymandering and the Supreme Court acceding to it...

...Only Chief Justice Warren Burger opposed it flatly as "racial gerrymandering" that "moves us one step farther away from a truly homogeneous society...

...There is even something winningly democratic about the give and take of the game...

...In upholding it, Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed the hope that "millions of nonwhite Americans will now be able to participate for the first time on an equal basis in the government under which thev live...

...One final, elementary observation about the odd nature of this government action...

...Would the cheers for the 1965 Voting Act have been quite so fervent, I wonder, if those who were doing the cheering could have foreseen that in little more than a decade this law, designed to bring the spirit of the Constitution to the South, would be employed to impose a philosophy of the franchise that would surely have appalled the Founders...

...Justice Thurgood Marshall exempted himself from the case...

...The NAACP's effort was aimed at remedying a perceived wrong...

...There is no need to pretend that state apportionment is typically done by the pure in heart, or that black citizens, particularly in the center of Brooklyn, do not have a great many political interests in common...

...In this case, the remedy of using one kind of racial criteria to combat another kind could turn out to be as bad as the ailment...

...But in Brooklyn, no one charged that black citizens were being prevented from voting...

...Confused Court The Supreme Court split every which way in its decision...

...Neither is the fact that no ill motives need be attached to anyone in this case...

...And having made this gesture, he voted to uphold the redistricting plan...

...At a time when voters around the country are demonstrating a willingness to elect candidates whose complexions do not match their own, the government put its seal of approval on voting by race...

...The main defect of both is that they permit their advocates to evade the less pleasant aspects of the decision, which ought to be openly confronted as related issues move through the courts...

...If New York's election district lines had been drawn in a totally objective, totally colorblind way, as civic reformers have been demanding for many years, they would probably still have had to be redrawn to meet the 65 per cent quota, a fact that civics teachers may have difficulty explaining to their classes in good government...

...Since at least the year 1812, when the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, re-districted his state to assure his party's control of the legislature, civic reformers have been protesting against gerrymandering...

...It was also necessary to divide a community of Hasidic Jews down the middle, on the reasoning that this exotic sect has political interests identical with all other whites—an assumption that did not sit well with the Hasidim and caused them to bring the suit they have just lost in the Supreme Court...