All votes matter, but some matter more than others.

     The Field Negro education series continues.

"They are creative, I'll give 'em that. The same conservatives who succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act last year are now attacking the principle of one person, one vote, and the court has just agreed to hear their case. The purpose of both maneuvers is the same, to help Republicans win elections by diluting or suppressing Democratic votes, in particular the votes of black and brown people. As Greg Palast put it:

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court put a knife into the guts of the Voting Rights Act, making it almost impossible to enforce laws that prevented discrimination against voters of color. Here we are again -- the same group.

 

The case of Evenwel v. Abbott centers on the question of how legislative districts should be drawn, given that a number of Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1960s established the principle of equal representation, i.e., one person, one vote. In Reynolds v. Sims, the court found that districts in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as in all houses of a state legislature must "be apportioned substantially on a population basis," and that districts must "be of equal population."

Seems pretty straightforward. However, the plaintiffs in Evenwel claim that using population as the measure actually dilutes the vote of eligible voters in districts where there are proportionately fewer non-eligible voters, which includes anyone from disenfranchised felons, non-citizen but legal residents, undocumented immigrants, and, of course, children. Democratic districts are more likely to contain a disproportionate number of people who fall into those categories. That's why, explained election law guru Richard Hasen, a victory for the plaintiffs in this case will likely result in more electoral clout for Republican voters. If they win, FiveThirtyEight found the likely net outcome would be a shift of eight seats in the House of Representatives to the GOP.

The plaintiffs want the court to require states to ensure that every district has an equal number of eligible voters rather than an equal number of people (even though figuring that out is likely impossible, because, according to the folks at FiveThirtyEight, doing so "relies on statistics that nobody has"). If the plaintiffs win, states will be forced literally to count some people more than others. I told you there was something about this case that sounds familiar to anyone who knows our country's, er, problematic history on voting and discrimination.

Nina Perales is the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that opposed the Evenwel plaintiffs. She called their effort "an attempt to cut back on growing Latino political strength in [Texas] by packing Latinos into a smaller number of districts."

There is a lot to unpack in this case, in terms of constitutionality and legal principles. Although the issues are complex, the aforementioned Hasen nonetheless characterized the Court's decision to take it "a surprise move." He added that he had "considered the issue fairly settled by the Supreme Court that states have the power to decide whether to use total population or another measure for drawing district lines." At this point, nothing surprises me when it comes to conservative attempts to win elections by changing the rules of the voting process rather than actually trying to, you know, win votes.

On the matter of it sounding familiar, one thing that stuck in my mind as I was reading about this case was how much it reminded me of something from the time of America's founding, a morally suspect deal struck in order to keep slave-owning states in the union as the Constitution came together.

   The specific circumstances of the Evenwel case certainly differ from those surrounding the Three-Fifths Compromise. However, the fundamental parallel remains. Even leaving aside the question of undocumented immigrants, if the conservative plaintiffs in Evenwel triumph, some Americans will count and others will not in determining the very same question at the heart of that debate from over two centuries ago, namely how to draw legislative districts of equal size.

Ultimately, the Three-Fifths Compromise allowed Southern white conservatives to gain greater representation in the House of Representatives than they deserved, at least so long as they denied citizenship, freedom, and equal rights to those Americans of African descent whom they enslaved in such large numbers. After slavery was outlawed, the South got an even greater unearned benefit in representation because -- under Jim Crow -- they denied black men the right to vote while counting 100 percent (as opposed to three-fifths) of Southern blacks in their states' population. This discrepancy only grew wider after women won the right to vote in 1920 -- except in the South, where, until 1965, whites continued to disenfranchise black women as well as men while happily counting their numbers for purposes of representation.

This case is by no means the equivalent of slavery, or of Jim Crow. But that is a very low bar to clear in 2015. The Evenwel case is, without question, part of a long-term, multi-pronged effort by conservative activists and Republican officials to alter election and voting rules in a way that enhances their electoral prospects. In other words, they want to fix the game. Having already achieved much, they certainly aren't going to allow something like counting a person as a person stand in their way.

Will the Supreme Court see this scheme for what it is and rule in favor of not counting some Americans more than others? Or, on the other hand, will the five conservatives on the Court see it for what it is and give the conservative plaintiffs exactly what they want, knowing full well the purpose behind their push? Given how the court ruled on the Voting Rights Act, we need to be prepared for the worst. If that indeed comes to pass, the next question will be: What are we who believe that voting rights and equality are sacrosanct going to do about it?" [Source]

The most important job of a president, in my humble opinion, is appointing Justices to serve on the Supreme Court. Our next president might have as much as four appointments.

Keep that in mind when you go to the voting booth to select your next president.

"Back To The Future"?

*

I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Primarily because I find the political and racial atmosphere in A-merry-ca to be so fascinating.

Anyway, my man Matef from Socal shot me an e-mail today, which led me to the following article from Naomi Klein. It's a long article and it's creating a lot of buzz in certain circles. If you are a thinking person, or in anyway intellectually curious, you should read it. Here is a sampling:

"Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a "post-racial" era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, was "racist" against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped "the Gates controversy", the furore over the president's response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama's remark that the police had acted "stupidly" was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president "has a deep-seated hatred for white people".

Obama's supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as "a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist", Jones resigned last Sunday.

The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to "take our country back". Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of "massive resistance" launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today's "new era of 'massive resistance'," writes Rose, "is also a white racial project."

There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

For many antiracist campaigners, the realisation that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference on racism, widely known as "Durban II". Almost all of the public debate about the conference focused on its supposed anti-Israel bias. When it actually took place in April in Geneva, virtually all we heard about was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory speech, which was met with rowdy disruptions, from the EU delegates who walked out, to the French Jewish students who put on clown wigs and red noses, and tried to shout him down.

Lost in the circus atmosphere was the enormous importance of the conference to people of African descent, and nowhere more so than among Obama's most loyal base. The US civil rights movement had embraced the first Durban conference, held in summer 2001, with great enthusiasm, viewing it as the start of the final stage of Martin Luther King's dream for full equality. Though most black leaders offered only timid public criticism of the president's Durban II boycott, the decision was discussed privately as his most explicit betrayal of the civil rights struggle since taking office.

The original 2001 gathering was not all about Israelis v Palestinians, or antisemitism, as so many have claimed (though all certainly played a role). The conference was overwhelmingly about Africa, the ongoing legacy of slavery and the huge unpaid debts that the rich owe the poor.

Holding the 2001 World Conference against Racism in what was still being called "the New South Africa" had seemed a terrific idea. World leaders would gather to congratulate themselves on having slain the scourge of apartheid, then pledge to defeat the world's few remaining vestiges of discrimination – things such as police violence, unequal access to certain jobs, lack of adequate healthcare for minorities and intolerance towards immigrants. Appropriate disapproval would be expressed for such failures of equality, and a well-meaning document pledging change would be signed to much fanfare. That, at least, is what western governments expected to happen.

They were mistaken. When the conference arrived in Durban, many delegates were shocked by the angry mood in the streets: tens of thousands of South Africans joined protests outside the conference centre, holding signs that said "Landlessness = racism" and "New apartheid: rich and poor". Many denounced the conference as a sham, and demanded concrete reparations for the crimes of apartheid. South Africa's disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, in both the streets and the assembly halls. Around the world, developing countries were increasingly identifying the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies as little more than a clever rebranding effort, a way for former northern colonial powers to continue to drain the southern countries of their wealth without being inconvenienced by the heavy lifting of colonialism. Roughly two years before Durban, a coalition of developing countries had refused further to liberalise their economies, leading to the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle. A few months later, a newly militant movement calling for a debt jubilee disrupted the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Durban was a continuation of this mounting southern rebellion, but it added something else to the mix: an invoice for past thefts.

Although it was true that southern countries owed debts to foreign banks and lending institutions, it was also true that in the colonial period – the first wave of globalisation – the wealth of the north was built, in large part, on stolen indigenous land and free labour provided by the slave trade. Many in Durban argued that when these two debts were included in the calculus, it was actually the poorest regions of the world – especially Africa and the Caribbean – that turned out to be the creditors and the rich world that owed a debt. All big UN conferences tend to coalesce around a theme, and in Durban 2001 the clear theme was the call for reparations. The overriding message was that even though the most visible signs of racism had largely disappeared – colonial rule, apartheid, Jim Crow-style segregation – profound racial divides will persist and even widen until the states and corporations that profited from centuries of state-sanctioned racism pay back some of what they owe..."

Sometimes we just "can't see the forest for the trees". Especially when we live in the forest.

More here, and in September's Harper's Magazine.

*Pic courtesy of Michael Reynolds and the Guardian.