Black Representatives=Representation of Blacks? –

Black Representatives=Representation of Blacks? – Here’s an odd thing: the lead OpEd in Tuesday’s Washington Post (in the sense of being at the top of the page) was not in the online edition all day. It just appeared there (11:45PM Tuesday night). I’d like to think it’s because of the email I sent asking why it was absent. Anyway, it’s by David Lublin and is entitled “The Real Story in Georgia.”

What Lublin regards as “the real story” is not the defeat of McKinney and Barr but rather that

[t]wo African American Democrats running in majority-white districts appear likely to clinch their party’s nominations for open seats and then win the general elections. Their victories would signal that African Americans can win in such districts, opening the way to future gains in black representation…. The victories … demonstrate that black congressional representation may continue to expand despite the limits on new majority-black districts.

This piece is interesting on a number of fronts (other than its absence all day from the online edition). First, the author is identified as an associate professor of political science at American University, but not as the author of The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton, 1997). His book takes a decidedly more pessimistic stance toward black electoral prospects, arguing for example that majority-minority districts

“are crucial to election of significant numbers of African-American and Latino representatives. African Americans and Latinos almost never win election from white majority districts. (p. xiii)

Lublin seems to have changed his mind about black prospects, but I believe he was wrong in 1997 when the book was published. In 1996, for example, all three black Georgia Democrats were re-elected to the House, and two of them won in new white-majority districts. The one and only (and now gone) Cynthia McKinney won with an astounding 59% of the vote in a district that had been redrawn so that it was 65% white.

Readers of my recent posts will not be surprised to hear that I believe another interesting aspect of this column is a certain conceptual fuzziness concerning the relationship of “black representation,” “black congressional representation,” “black political advances,” and simply electing blacks to office. Lublin’s is conventional political science of the counting noses variety, and if the elected noses are black he assumes black interests are represented. But as our friend Cornel West recently observed, electing a black is not necessarily the best way to insure the promotion of black interests (whatever they are).

Lublin does say that “African Americans elected from majority-white districts will have great racial crossover appeal [Well, yes, otherwise they wouldn’t have won! Isn’t political science great?] even while remaining loyal to their black electoral base.” The newer generation of black officials, in short, can represent whites perfectly well (otherwise they would have no “crossover appeal”), and presumably whites can, on occasion, also do a good job of representing blacks.

So why should we continue to make such a big deal of the race of candidates, or voters?

Not so long ago voting discrimination meant blacks were not allowed to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 pretty much put an end to that, but the 1982 amendments to it went beyond outlawing discrimination to affirmatively requiring the creation of the maximum number of districts that would allow blacks to elect the “candidates of their choice,” which in turn required majority-minority districts. The Supremes have trimmed the excesses of this effort, but since blacks are largely indistinguishable from Democrats, and partisan redistricting is permissible, the racial gerrymandering structure is still in place.

Advocates of race-based representation, such as the old Lublin, always under-estimated the ability of black candidates to win in majority-white districts, and the willingness of whites to elect blacks has increased dramatically over the years since the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Moreover, the argument for race-based representation was always driven more by the felt necessity of electing more blacks than any cogent theory of representation or principle of civil rights. If, after all, one accepted the only apparent theory — a racially essentialist version of multiculturalism and diversity — then Hispanics would deserve majority-Hispanic districts (something many black incumbents would oppose). Even narrower, Cubans in Miami would deserve their own majority-Cuban district, presumably leaving many Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Haitians, etc., un-represented. And, on this theory, how could the Arabs (Muslims?) in Detroit and New Jersey be denied?

This theory is not incoherent, but it is un-American. The United States (states, not tribes) could have been organized as an ethnic confederation, but it wasn’t.