Jim Crow Digs In
EDITORIAL Jim Crow Digs In On March 1, a panel of the federal government's leading number crunchers decided that it might not be such a good idea, after all, for the Census Bureau to adjust last...
...No, there's no reason to think so...
...And after generally extensive litigation, the federal courts have routinely invalidated those dis-tricts—because the Voting Rights Act clearly doesn't require them, just as the Constitution's 14th Amendment clearly doesn't permit them...
...Any state that dared resist the RNC's entreaties soon found that Republican appointees in the Bush Justice Department were prepared to demand that it acquiesce—on the basis of an invented-for-the-occasion legal argument that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outright required the creation of Bantustan congressional districts, the contorted shapes and racialist nature of which had not been seen in the United States since the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South...
...Will the Republican party of George Bush fils now work to contain the gerrymandering contagion that his father's confederates did so much to spread...
...And because Congress has neglected to revisit the Voting Rights Act for almost 20 years, federal law, it will surprise a great many people to learn, still strongly echoes that separate-but-equal view...
...Of course, if that expert panel is right, and the sampling advocates are wrong, all this anger and piety amounts to nothing— another sterile debate about numbers...
...Can it be, in the year 2001, that Monterey, California, and Brooklyn, New York, cannot be trusted to administer non-racist voting booths...
...Never once in the process, however, have the courts managed to explain precisely what our laws do require and permit in the area of race-conscious redistricting...
...So much do Democrats quail before the Congressional Black Caucus and like-minded interest groups that the party has lately gone on record swearing to defend the device...
...Section 5 of the Act, for example, continues to subject the presumptively discriminatory election systems of 16 specific states, in whole or part, to mandatory Justice Department supervision...
...Together they account for more than a third of total U.S...
...They would scour the Census Bureau's new precinct-level demographic data, looking to locate each state's heaviest concentrations of African-American voters—then as now the nation's most reliably Democratic constituency...
...The debate has unfortunately obscured the extent to which Census 2000 will genuinely implicate central constitutional interests for the millions of Americans it assigns to one or another "minority" category...
...The law, very explicitly, says yes...
...And if the government arranged its laws and practices to facilitate such a sinister design, that would be unlawful, wouldn't it...
...Last Tuesday he used it to justify a policy announcement he'd long been expected to make anyway: His Census Bureau subordinates would henceforth promulgate raw head counts only...
...Commerce secretary Don Evans couldn't have been happier with the substance and timing of this recommendation...
...And then by aggressively marketing the results, so that census data might continue to sustain perhaps the single most grotesque phenomenon of modern American identity politics: the rebirth of racial gerrymandering...
...But we're really not so sure any more...
...Next, the GOP would press a given state's redistricting authority to trace revised federal election boundaries around as many identified black neighborhoods as possible—the ugly though plausible theory being that isolating Democratic base voters in officially recognized "majority-minority" enclaves would vastly improve the fortunes of Republican candidates in every surrounding, thus-Caucasianized jurisdiction...
...territory and roughly a quarter of our national population...
...Congressional districts, for example, like North Carolina's pencil-thin 12th, which originally ran north to south for 160 miles down the center of the state, for much of its length comprising nothing but the asphalt pavement of Interstate 85—the better to avoid absorbing too many valuable white people from adjacent (Republican) areas...
...This explains why polite American opinion has greeted the Evans move with dismay...
...Several months ago, the American Civil Liberties Union submitted a brief to the U.S...
...The 1990 census was the first to work like this...
...Which means that final Census 2000 figures will not include those alleged millions of "overlooked" minority citizens who could purportedly have been recovered with precision by sampling techniques...
...No adjustments allowed...
...Amazing...
...EDITORIAL Jim Crow Digs In On March 1, a panel of the federal government's leading number crunchers decided that it might not be such a good idea, after all, for the Census Bureau to adjust last year's nationwide tally according to the "sampling" methods of modern statistical science...
...And the law thus makes itself ridiculous, and worse...
...If the ACLU were correct that this is what white people are up to, it would be sinister, wouldn't it...
...What could be wrong with the majority-minority district in question, the ACLU asked...
...Private plaintiffs have brought more than 100 lawsuits against such racially gerrymandered voting districts over the past ten years...
...Nor have they yet received so much as a speck of help in the effort from the institutional establishment of American politics...
...This scheme was effected beginning in 1991...
...By a deliberate design for which both political parties must share significant blame, the census will serve to abuse the franchise of every voting-age citizen it classifies as a minori-ty—not by counting such people badly or well, but simply by counting them separately in the first place...
...Leading civil rights organizations all enthusiastically approve of racial gerrymandering, ideologically wed as they are, against substantial evidence to the contrary, to the belief that only in "majority-minority" election districts can a non-white politician ever run and win...
...It might make the enumeration's inaccurate raw head counts even more inaccurate...
...Supreme Court in defense of a racially gerrymandered district currently represented by an African-American Democrat and surrounded by districts of a lighter, more Republican hue...
...Early in the administration of George Bush pere, the Republican National Committee concocted a novel plan to manipulate the forthcoming decennial reapportionment of congressional voting districts across the country...
...We have attorneys ready," he told the Washington Post...
...After all, the ACLU brief continued, "there is nothing sinister or unlawful about the desires or efforts of whites to elect candidates of their choice, including candidates of their own race...
...And it was only a few weeks ago that National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Davis restated an intention to press his party's advantage to the max...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...They're convinced they have a winner here...
...But the Democratic party will not raise a finger to set things right...
...If, in the next round of redistricting, any state proposes to reduce the minority percentage of even a single district's registered electorate, Davis vows to sue...
...Which in turn means that nationwide congressional representation will shortly be reapportioned among the states, and voting district boundaries will be redrawn, as if those theoretical millions did not exist...
...We hope so...
...Never mind that, where overall numbers are concerned, it is Democratic incumbents in the House of Representatives who suffer most directly from racial gerrymandering...
...And why the Democratic party, which fancies itself the One True Church for polite opinionators and minority citizens alike, has so eagerly condemned Evans for it...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 26
