On Benign Bigotry

The Supreme Court Takes A Step

Times change, as do circumstances. Even so simple and elegant a sentence as:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

can be mucked around with. For example, “all” men didn’t include slaves, not to Jefferson, who wrote it…and all “men” didn’t include women. And it is entirely possible that there an ancient graybeard “creator” didn’t “decide” to “endow” these rights. They were claimed, in the ragged but wonderful process of history, and turned into unthinkable freedom and prosperity.

Even after the historic atrocity of slavery was abolished, laws were made—and upheld by the Supreme Court—which, in certain parts of the country, directly contradicted that founding principle. There were a hundred years of racial segregation after the Emancipation. Innumerable murders and rapes and casual brutalities were done in the name of white superiority. The trudge to justice began to gather steam in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education, which abolished school segregation—in law, if not in fact. The 1960s saw the trudge become a rush and among the laws passed to rectify inequities was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The summer of 1964, college students—I’ll forever regret I wasn’t one of them—went to Mississippi to register black voters. According to the New York Times:

Of the estimated 17,000 African Americans who tried to register to vote that summer, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, only 1,600 applications were accepted.

People were killed trying to establish that basic right. A federal law was necessary to enforce it. But the right to vote was established. And now, times have changed: A law enacted to combat racism became a law that sustained racialism—which is, in my definition, a system, benignly intended, to treat people differently according to race. Voting “rights” have been distorted into something more: the right of black people to be represented by people of their same color (a foolish distinction given intermarriage and common humanity). This may have seemed a necessity at the time. It has now been the law of the land for more than 60 years, almost one-quarter of our time as a Republic…and I have a moral problem with it: It skirts the central doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. If all people are equal, racial distinctions of any sort should not be made. Indeed, because of the other guarantees of the Voting Rights Act, blacks have enjoyed—and taken advantage of—the right to vote in record numbers. Blacks represent 12% of the population and 13% of the electorate pretty consistently. In other words, wholesale discrimination against black voters no longer exists in this country, even if the Democratic Party pretends that it does. (In a hilarious corollary, widespread voter fraud—which Republicans insist is a scandal in poor neighborhoods—doesn’t exist either.) Blacks do not have the right to be represented by other blacks, despite the Second Section of the Voting Rights Act. The same, of course, goes for whites or Latinos.

Indeed, I’ve been writing about racial gerrymandering for 40 years now and I’m convinced that it represents, as all gerrymandering does, a fundamental perversion of democracy to achieve political ends. It has supercharged the disastrous hyperpartisan disintegration of the country. In Georgia, in the 1990s, for example, a conspiracy of black urban state representatives combined with white surburban Republican counterparts to eliminate every moderate white Democrat from the state’s Congressional delegation. That happened everywhere in the south…and in the north. It was a foolish minority-making deal that only the most guilty and self-righteous of so-called “progressives” would make.

And so, I welcome the Supreme Court’s decision to severely limit racial gerrymandering. It is, if you’ll excuse the phrase, an actual exercise in anti-racism. It will be good for our souls. It’s appropriate—indeed, beneficial—for members of the Black Congressional Caucus—a racialist body—to have to gain the approval of some white voters to retain their seats. And, very much, vice versa. White representatives, knee-jerk Trumpers especially, should have to court some black votes to be reelected.

Now, you will hear much nonsense about this in the next few days. On CNN this afternoon, I watched the minority court argument cited—especially Kagan’s ridiculous notion that this opens the door to another Bloody Sunday—Selma, 1965. But there was not a single word of the majority argument against making distinctions according to race. We need to hear that argument. No wonder the Trumpers think the media are biased.

We classical liberals should force the knee-jerk Dems to explain why distinctions should still be made according to race, and against the true American spirit. There will be those who argue pragmatic politics—that this will help the Republicans in future elections. I’m not so sure. Actually, I simply don’t care. Even if that were the case, how comfortable do so-called progressives feel supporting racialism to win their agenda? It’s a mug’s game, as has been amply demonstrated in recent elections. White America thinks racial advantages are unfair. They have a vote, too—even if they’re less assiduous about casting their ballots than blacks are.

The Democratic Party continues under the delusion that it can win with the chimera of “affordability” while quietly pursuing its racialist agenda. And there’s another delusion: that they can win because independents and sanity conservatives have abandoned the mad Trump. But one should ask: What led them to vote for Trump in the first place, if not the Democrats’ willingness to bend the law for perceived racial advantage?

And what about black people? Their advances over the past 60 years have been remarkable. They should be celebrated. The knee-jerk Democratic view that blacks are perpetually aggrieved has been rendered inoperative by history. There is now a black middle and professional class. They have a cornucopia of interesting political views. The wall-to-wall patronizing of white liberals is a gagging affront to the capacious variety of black intellect.

Of course, racism exists. It always will. There is a caucasian poison of imagined grievance that will infect a minority of white people, especially those too lazy to get up off the couch and learn a trade. There is a pretty sure path out of poverty—the sociological studies are solid and consistent over decades—for blacks and underclass whites that liberals knee-jerk disdain: Graduate high school, get a job and take it seriously, don’t have children until you’re married. The chance of winding up poor then becomes fractional, less than 10%. Poverty is a lifestyle choice, not a consequence of bigotry.

The unwillingness of so-called “progressives”—actually, they are true reactionaries—to understand that there is a culture of poverty remains a practical impediment to success for Democrats. Which is a shame, because there are many valuable things government can be doing—must be doing—and isn’t, because the perception of race favoritism, benign bigotry, has become so deeply ingrained in American politics.

I realize that views like those above will be attacked and derided—been there, had the threats and imprecations—by mindless lefties, still living in an imaginary world of the past. I stand by what I write. If you think such things need to be said, and not only by the far-right, please consider subscribing to Sanity Clause. You might even choose a paid subscription: