Southern Republican lawmakers in two states are calling into question who can officially call themselves Black. After decades of efforts to sublimate Black Americans with laws such as the “one-drop rule” that would limit their power and enforce a color line, the GOP now wants to erase Black Americans altogether. This is why we need Congress to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as soon as possible.
Republicans in Louisiana and Alabama are challenging a section of the Voting Rights Act in an effort to whitewash the power of Black voters. As NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports, the fight is over redrawing congressional districts in Alabama and Louisiana in the wake of the 2020 census. How the Supreme Court rules on an Alabama case will set the stage for what it means to be “Black”—and how these states define someone.
The challenge is to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Wang reports. The lower courts in both states have agreed that the way maps are currently drawn suppresses the strength of Black voters and therefore violates Section 2 by giving Black voters "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
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Since the 2003 Georgia v. Ashcroft Supreme Court Ruling, the definition of “Black” has been anyone who’s checked that box on the census—even if they also check another race.
The Alabama GOP is hoping to limit that definition to only those who solely check Black. And in Louisiana, they’d like “Black” folks to be those who only check either Black alone or Black and white, NPR reports.
Eventually, Alabama dropped its “single-race Black metric” before appealing its redistricting case to the Supreme Court, but Louisiana has stayed the course and is asking the court to look to redefining Black. Ultimately, how the court rules could have long-term ramifications for how districts are drawn, how Section 2 is used, and just how much the GOP will be allowed to suppress the voting rights of people of color under a radical interpretation of the law. Voting rights activists are anxiously watching.
Prior to the 2000 census, Americans were given only one option when it came to race. There was no opportunity to tick off one’s various racial identities.
Ann Morning, a professor of sociology at New York University who studies racial classification and has served as an outside adviser to the Census Bureau, tells NPR that "2000 was really a watershed moment for the U.S. census because it was the first time in American history that all Americans got the opportunity to identify themselves with more than one race.”
Those changes presented new challenges in voting laws. So the White House's Office of Management and Budget created guidance for folks who identified as multiracial. If you ticked off “Black” and another race, you were still counted as Black. And essentially, this settled things and how we draw maps today is based on this data. But Republicans in the South want to call that into question.
"It was a mild surprise that a group that had in many places tried their best not to talk about race, at least in the formal proceedings, all of a sudden took a very, let's just say, staunch and, I'd say, retrograde understanding of race and decided to say that in court,” Kareem Crayton, a former law professor, and redistricting consultant who advised Alabama's Democratic state House minority leader during the drawing of the state's new congressional map, told NPR.
Crayton added:
"It also made me wonder how much the Republican lawmakers were willing to just take their chances in court. That is, maybe this legislature looked at the U.S. Supreme Court and said, 'You know, we're going to try our hand at revisiting what most people thought about both racial definitions and, frankly, the state of the law on race and how race is used.’”
Here’s a little gerrymandering background from the History Channel:
“In March 1812, the Boston Gazette ran a political cartoon depicting ‘a new species of monster’: ‘The Gerry-mander.’ The forked-tongue creature was shaped like a contorted Massachusetts voting district that the state’s Jeffersonian Republicans had drawn to benefit their own party. Governor (and future vice president) Elbridge Gerry signed off on his party’s redistricting plan in February, unwittingly cementing his place in the United States lexicon of underhanded political tricks.”
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