It’s the continuation
of an issue first brought up a couple of years ago that gained legislative
scrutiny this past session. In the last round of reapportionment of city-parish
courts, East Baton Rouge had maintained its five districts, which in the
present day have three with majority white constituencies and two majority
black (although cases are not placed on dockets by geography; any of the judges
may hear cases from any part of the city-parish). Some have complained that
with the area having about 55 percent black population that this arrangement
was unfair, if not illegal, in some way, and filed suit accordingly.
Since judicial offices are not
considered policy-making institutions and that any judge may hear any case,
federal constitutional imperatives that channel state and local governments
into drawing district lines for other institutions place greater scrutiny on
those outcomes that prompt these governments typically to use race as a major
consideration into this districting, with the creation of “majority/minority”
districts, a scrutiny lacking when it comes to judicial redistricting. However,
even with the higher burden of proof suits leading to consent decrees in the
past have caused the state with jurisdictions with significant minority
populations to follow the same strategy with those judiciaries, with perhaps
the most famous example in Louisiana
being that of its Supreme Court.
But the problem from the
perspective of those who see the present city-parish arrangement as violating
the constitution – specifically, voters’ rights in that blacks have theirs
diluted – is that intent to discriminate must be demonstrated. Thus, federal
law could be used to introduce federal oversight to change the current plan to
one presumably based upon have three majority/minority districts, and have it
reviewed for at least (the suit asks) the next decade. However, there’s no
evidence on the surface that the Legislature, responsible for this, intended to
discriminate nor that this provides any obstacle to blacks voting or getting
elected to these offices.
So the plaintiffs have come up
with an inventive line of reasoning for square the circle. Statistically, most
whites vote for white candidates, and most blacks vote for black candidates.
Further, typically blacks eligible to vote actually do so at lower rates than
whites. Thus, they say, not only does this “rig” election of judges in the
current system so that only 40 percent of judges can be blacks where blacks
make up 55 percent of the population, but that even going to an at-large
system, as was used up until two decades ago, is unsatisfactory because too many
blacks disproportionately may not vote, in this constrictive view.
Which begs the obvious question:
nobody is forcing anybody to vote for anybody, or even to vote at all. If
certain outcomes occur, they were because of voluntary actions taken by individuals
facing no coercion to act in a certain way or not at all. Which introduces the
insidiousness of the plaintiffs’ argument: it claims that whites are forced to vote for white candidates
and blacks for blacks and that fewer blacks are
forced not to vote because of some undefined, nebulous, latent
discriminatory effect existing in society that cannot be measured directly (or
perhaps if attempted to be measured is met with duplicity) but which
nonetheless permeates society so thoroughly that we never may be rid of it.
More specifically, a “totality of
circumstances” suggests that society continues to “oppress” blacks to this day
to the detriment of voting rights. Disadvantages in education, jobs and health
that can hinder African Americans' ability to vote or generally participate in
democracy can be used to attempt to show this by arguing what is observed by
these is a product of a discriminatory system. To show that there is intent by
whites in creating such a system, information about the city’s history of
voting discrimination, the number of black candidates who have been elected
outside predominantly black districts in Baton Rouge and the number of African
Americans who ran for office can be introduced.
In other words, accepting this
relies upon a common tactic used by its advocates who say race must be taken
into account in the making of laws which define discrimination not on the basis
of intent, but results. Numbers that reveal inequality by definition and alone mean
policy intended to produce inequality must exist, regardless of whether there
exists any discriminatory design to that policy. This redefines equality not as
a concept of all having (if need be guaranteed by government regulation) the
same opportunities, but as them having the same outcomes regardless of the
actions taken by individuals that led to those outcomes. It’s largely an alien
concept to America’s historical definition of equality.
Yet it gets worse, as demonstrated
by the words of one supporter of the suit, state Rep. Pat Smith. She
argues that the problem with having, in numerical terms, blacks underrepresented
on the bench (reputing implicitly that the current system “causes” this)
relative to the population (and especially in that blacks disproportionately
are accused of crimes relative to the population) is that black judges have a personal
understanding of the ills of society black residents face that helps guide
their sentencing, or what we might term the “wise
Latina” theory of U.S. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Notice the invidious consequences
of this thinking. According to Smith, the only way a person of a certain race truly
will get justice is if a judge of the same race hears that trial. Thus, if 80
percent of those accused in the East Baton Rouge court system are black, why
not have four M/M districts? And isn’t Smith advocating for legal reverse
discrimination here, in that a black judge may rule inappropriately on the fate
of a white defendant, since he is disqualified by his race from knowing about
the lives and environments of whites, yet she seems unconcerned about this
alleged miscarriage of justice? Does she not think it possible that a person’s
erudition and wisdom, regardless of whatever immutable characteristics that person
may possess, allows them to understand general principles and apply them to
specific cases, instead of having to be like the specific case in order truly
to understand it?
These views simply are stupidity
writ large, ignoring if not denying truths about the human condition and the
state of civil rights in America today. There are no literacy tests today.
There are no poll taxes. It is illegal to prevent someone from registering to
vote on the basis of race. It is illegal to intimidate people from voting,
period. Lower incomes and unemployment are not inevitabilities stamped onto
someone because of their race, but products of choices made (with laws
preventing attenuation of those choices) that may require more effort and
sacrifices by some than others to avoid. To argue otherwise is to assert that
there is no individual agency in decisions to vote, or for whom to vote, or to
stay in school, or to work hard, or to make voluntary choices in your personal
life that facilitate attaining these goals.
Yet arguing against these truisms
is what this suit is all about. Its mechanistic view, of some unseen force in
the shadows visiting oppression onto some and privileging onto others (while
still having the vast majority of even the privileged ultimately unknowingly under
the control of a powerful few to whom attitudes about race rule their lives)
that predetermines elections and therefore justice, a distortion of the real
world based upon race, is itself a racist attitude, ascribing motives without
evidence but only on some concept of racial advantage or disadvantage. It dehumanizes
people in that it does not consider them either capable of thinking for
themselves or able of acting in their own best interests, without the intervention
by the propagators of this odious notion to lead them around.
Despite that there are no laws
preventing people to register or vote on the basis of race, or making them vote
or in a certain way, nor any institutionalized forces that compel the same, the
plaintiffs and the ideological supporters behind them want the court to buy
into the notion that none of this is true, that America need not be race-neutral in its policy-making. That court needs to reject this
repugnant redefining of the roles of the individual and the state that is
decisively at odds with America’s founding principles.
2 comments:
The answer is simple - make all the districts at large.
Your analysis of Pat Smith's statements is stunning and enlightening.
"It is illegal to intimidate people from voting, period."
That really doesn't solve the problem, though. It may be illegal to intimidate people from voting, and yet it still happens, usually thanks to conservative organizations, and the GOP.
Voter ID laws are one such method used. Currently, you can vote while stoned, drunk, or while being mentally incompetent enough to vote Republican, but if you don't have the money or transportation or other means available to get a driver's license or other government-issued ID, you're shit out of luck.
In New Orleans, on election days, conservatives and the radical right-wing covertly drop flyers in the poorest neighborhoods telling people if they intend to vote, they will first need to pay unpaid parking tickets, credit card balances, and utility bills.
Redistricting is another method of disenfranchisement. So are recent Voter ID laws.
You also lose a lot of points with your straw man "reverse racism" accusations.
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