One Race, One Vote?

Campus Report ^ | June 30, 2009 | Mytheos Holt

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One Race, One Vote?

by: Mytheos Holt, June 30, 2009

In her recent book Voting Right—And Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, noted race relations scholar Abigail Thernstrom makes the argument that, in the aftermath of the election of Barack Obama, the Voting Rights Act has actually begun hampering and damaging the very racial group it was originally intended to protect. “Today the Voting Rights Act arguably serves as a brake on black political aspirations and a barrier to greater integration…the law has created a black political class too isolated from mainstream political discourse,” Thernstrom writes in her introduction, in the first of many indictments of the modern Voting Rights Act regime.

Given the potentially inflammatory nature of this argument, Thernstrom takes sometimes excessive pains to distinguish herself from Southern apologists, writing such defensive passages such as:

• “Those who raised serious questions about the Voting Rights Act were primarily southerners who, with the notable exception of Justice Hugo Black, had no credibility,”

• “Nothing short of radical federal intervention would have enfranchised southern blacks,” and

• “Only the morally obtuse could fail to understand the degree to which the widespread, deliberate disenfranchisement of African Americans in the Jim Crow South threatened the legitimacy of American democratic government.”

However, once this historically deferential throat clearing is concluded, Thernstrom begins to methodically and persuasively pick apart the need for “radical federal intervention,” which took the form of “statistical triggers” enshrined in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act and constitutionally dubious “preclearance” measures in Section 5. Of the “triggers,” Thernstrom writes that “the logic of the statistical trigger was clear.....

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“The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections”

i.e. If the quote unquote “black community” loses in any conceivable arena, it must be because of racism.

i.e. If the quote unquote “black community” loses in any conceivable arena, it must be because of racism. And the beat goes on...