Jim Sleeper: Is Obama as Brave as His Black Memphis Supporters?
Last night, a 60%-black Memphis congressional district re-elected its one-term white liberal incumbent, Steve Cohen, despite TV ads by his black challenger Nikki Tinker that associated him falsely with the Klan and asked why Cohen would "pray in our churches" while voting against mandatory prayer in public schools.
Cohen had won in 2006 with only 31% of the vote, probably because several black challengers split the remainder. But last night, given two years to prove himself an effective representative, he won 79 - 19%.
Does anyone realize how important, and beautiful, this is? Emily's List didn't, as M.J. showed here, until it finally shook off its identity politics and saw that not every female candidate is better than every male. Barack Obama was cagey and quiet on this one, and thereby hangs a tale.
More than a decade ago, in Liberal Racism and this article, among others, I tried to persuade liberals how important and valuable it was that white-majority electorates in several Southern congressional districts had just elected blacks, in the 1996 elections.
The civil-rights establishment refused to believe that it had even happened. Obama, teaching about racial districting then at the University of Chicago, read my arguments but never mentioned them in class. (Yesterday, belatedly, he did condemn Tinker's odious ads but didn't make an endorsement.)
The root of the problem of racial districting that recapitulates racism itself was the defensiveness of voting-rights activists, black and white. Having struggled so bravely to pass the Voting Rights Act in the teeth of the more racist, segregationist America of the 1960s, many still cling to the assumption that people will vote only in racial blocs and that, therefore, no black can go to Congress unless districts are drawn to ensure heavy black majorities.
In 1982, the civil-rights industry passed amendments to the Voting Rights Act that forced ever-more absurdly shaped districts to snake across bits of so many different counties, school boards, and other jurisdictions. It thereby carved out black majorities in congressional districts whose residents had nothing else in common except race (or Hispanic surnames). I described the effects of this in New York City in Liberal Racism.
The creation of districts like this only whitened the neighboring districts around them, allowing new Republican challengers to replace the white Democrats who'd been moderate because, under the old configurations, they'd had to answer to more than few black or Hispanic voters as well as white ones. Now, they no longer did. Congress got a few more black representatives (not many), and a lot more white Republicans, along with Speaker Newt Gingrich. Congratulations, race industry!
In their ivory towers, law professors like Pamela Karlan who championed these ideologically, penitentially driven recapitulations of racism concluded only that racism must be rising -- especially when, in 1995, Supreme Court majorities, thanks to Sandra Day O'Connor, invalidated some of the racially drawn districts as the absurdities they were, thereby forcing their new black incumbents to run for re-election in newly drawn districts that were no longer majority black.
Howls of outrage and prophecies of doom came from many of Obama's colleagues in the law schools and from his future friend Deval Patrick, now governor of Massachusetts but then Bill Clinton's assistant attorney general for civil rights.
The New York Times, under editorial-page editor Howell Raines, a penitential Southerner, raged at the Court's supposed attack on voting rights and invoked the specters of segregation. (Yes, the self-righteous Raines set the Times back on race in more ways than one.)
Then election day came in 1996. Five black incumbents whose districts had been invalidated by the Court decided to run again anyway, in majority white or majority white-and-Hispanic districts, in the South. And they all won.
In those elections, it was white voters who discredited the race industry's assumptions of racist bloc voting; last night, black voters did the same, for the umpteenth time, but in an especially dramatic way, given Tinker's ads. They defied both racial demagoguery and the presumptions of their self-appointed caretakers in the race industry, who keep on drawing these districts to allow black voters to elect what the law euphemistically calls, "candidates of their choice." Well, they did choose. Again. Get it yet?
We'll see. In 1996, in a series of almost hilarious denials, the black incumbents' victories were dismissed as flukes by law professors like Karlan (who is still holding out) and by the Times. (Last night's victory was covered by the Times in a story buried in the Politics Page, not in my print edition, where it didn't appear at all, but online. Had a white candidate run racist ads against a black candidate analogous to the ones Tinker ran against Cohen, the story would have made Page 1).
The best quick account of this how voters defied this absurdity in 1996 is this article I wrote at the time. (The pdf may take a minute to come up, but it's worth the wait.) The most effective detailed exposition of what's at stake is Chapter 3. "Voting Wrongs," of my Liberal Racism.
Finally, some professors and activists are coming around, notably the scholar of voting rights Richard H. Pildes of New York University Law School, who has a short, smart reassessment of the Voting Rights Act's amendments in the Yale Law Journal.
I don't suggest that the ubiquity and relentlessness of racism have ended. Part of the problem is actuarial: Obama may lose -- or win only in a squeaker -- because many whites, still able to make it to the polls, will not under any circumstances vote for a black. He could also lose for the subtler reason that even those who consider themselves beyond such racism remain captive to racist stereotypes that help them rationalize the doubts sown by the Republicans' negative ads.
But Obama would never have become the Democratic nominee, against the formidable Hillary Clinton, if a growing part of this country weren't ready for change on this front, at least. Last night's election in a majority-black district in Memphis confirms this just as fully as Obama's victory in Iowa did at the start of this year and as five black incumbents' victories in the South confirmed twelve years ago. I wish that Obama had shown the courage of black Memphis voters' convictions by endorsing Cohen against the trapped and odious Tinker, just as he undoubtedly cheered the black incumbents' victories at white hands in 1996.
Read entire article at TPM Cafe
Cohen had won in 2006 with only 31% of the vote, probably because several black challengers split the remainder. But last night, given two years to prove himself an effective representative, he won 79 - 19%.
Does anyone realize how important, and beautiful, this is? Emily's List didn't, as M.J. showed here, until it finally shook off its identity politics and saw that not every female candidate is better than every male. Barack Obama was cagey and quiet on this one, and thereby hangs a tale.
More than a decade ago, in Liberal Racism and this article, among others, I tried to persuade liberals how important and valuable it was that white-majority electorates in several Southern congressional districts had just elected blacks, in the 1996 elections.
The civil-rights establishment refused to believe that it had even happened. Obama, teaching about racial districting then at the University of Chicago, read my arguments but never mentioned them in class. (Yesterday, belatedly, he did condemn Tinker's odious ads but didn't make an endorsement.)
The root of the problem of racial districting that recapitulates racism itself was the defensiveness of voting-rights activists, black and white. Having struggled so bravely to pass the Voting Rights Act in the teeth of the more racist, segregationist America of the 1960s, many still cling to the assumption that people will vote only in racial blocs and that, therefore, no black can go to Congress unless districts are drawn to ensure heavy black majorities.
In 1982, the civil-rights industry passed amendments to the Voting Rights Act that forced ever-more absurdly shaped districts to snake across bits of so many different counties, school boards, and other jurisdictions. It thereby carved out black majorities in congressional districts whose residents had nothing else in common except race (or Hispanic surnames). I described the effects of this in New York City in Liberal Racism.
The creation of districts like this only whitened the neighboring districts around them, allowing new Republican challengers to replace the white Democrats who'd been moderate because, under the old configurations, they'd had to answer to more than few black or Hispanic voters as well as white ones. Now, they no longer did. Congress got a few more black representatives (not many), and a lot more white Republicans, along with Speaker Newt Gingrich. Congratulations, race industry!
In their ivory towers, law professors like Pamela Karlan who championed these ideologically, penitentially driven recapitulations of racism concluded only that racism must be rising -- especially when, in 1995, Supreme Court majorities, thanks to Sandra Day O'Connor, invalidated some of the racially drawn districts as the absurdities they were, thereby forcing their new black incumbents to run for re-election in newly drawn districts that were no longer majority black.
Howls of outrage and prophecies of doom came from many of Obama's colleagues in the law schools and from his future friend Deval Patrick, now governor of Massachusetts but then Bill Clinton's assistant attorney general for civil rights.
The New York Times, under editorial-page editor Howell Raines, a penitential Southerner, raged at the Court's supposed attack on voting rights and invoked the specters of segregation. (Yes, the self-righteous Raines set the Times back on race in more ways than one.)
Then election day came in 1996. Five black incumbents whose districts had been invalidated by the Court decided to run again anyway, in majority white or majority white-and-Hispanic districts, in the South. And they all won.
In those elections, it was white voters who discredited the race industry's assumptions of racist bloc voting; last night, black voters did the same, for the umpteenth time, but in an especially dramatic way, given Tinker's ads. They defied both racial demagoguery and the presumptions of their self-appointed caretakers in the race industry, who keep on drawing these districts to allow black voters to elect what the law euphemistically calls, "candidates of their choice." Well, they did choose. Again. Get it yet?
We'll see. In 1996, in a series of almost hilarious denials, the black incumbents' victories were dismissed as flukes by law professors like Karlan (who is still holding out) and by the Times. (Last night's victory was covered by the Times in a story buried in the Politics Page, not in my print edition, where it didn't appear at all, but online. Had a white candidate run racist ads against a black candidate analogous to the ones Tinker ran against Cohen, the story would have made Page 1).
The best quick account of this how voters defied this absurdity in 1996 is this article I wrote at the time. (The pdf may take a minute to come up, but it's worth the wait.) The most effective detailed exposition of what's at stake is Chapter 3. "Voting Wrongs," of my Liberal Racism.
Finally, some professors and activists are coming around, notably the scholar of voting rights Richard H. Pildes of New York University Law School, who has a short, smart reassessment of the Voting Rights Act's amendments in the Yale Law Journal.
I don't suggest that the ubiquity and relentlessness of racism have ended. Part of the problem is actuarial: Obama may lose -- or win only in a squeaker -- because many whites, still able to make it to the polls, will not under any circumstances vote for a black. He could also lose for the subtler reason that even those who consider themselves beyond such racism remain captive to racist stereotypes that help them rationalize the doubts sown by the Republicans' negative ads.
But Obama would never have become the Democratic nominee, against the formidable Hillary Clinton, if a growing part of this country weren't ready for change on this front, at least. Last night's election in a majority-black district in Memphis confirms this just as fully as Obama's victory in Iowa did at the start of this year and as five black incumbents' victories in the South confirmed twelve years ago. I wish that Obama had shown the courage of black Memphis voters' convictions by endorsing Cohen against the trapped and odious Tinker, just as he undoubtedly cheered the black incumbents' victories at white hands in 1996.