I long took for granted that US opinion polls break down respondents into white people, black people and Hispanics. But I’ve come to look askance at this convention. Reporting on political views by race now seems perverse. It implies that a citizen’s primary identity is grounded in skin colour, and it reifies a way of thinking about the American people that is regressive, divisive, inaccurate and downright un-American.
I was reminded of this recent point of annoyance last week when the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that none too subtly contrived to create an additional majority-black district. (The district in question drizzled and blobbed diagonally from one northern corner of the state to the far southern one like a trail of ink on blotting paper.) The court’s conservative majority ruled that districting by race is unconstitutional. Democrats were horrified, because districts fixed as majority black are also traditionally fixed as majority Democratic.
For me, the issues are two: gerrymandering by race and gerrymandering, period.
Rigging majority-black districts suggests that the interests of all black Americans are aligned by dint of simply being black and that those interests will not be represented by non-black voters. It likewise suggests black people will only achieve a political voice by electing representatives who are also black (which by and large black voters do) and that non-black voters will not elect black politicians – even though a white-majority electorate voted for a black president twice.
But the interests of all black Americans are not aligned – or if aligned, those interests are largely shared by their non-black compatriots, such as affordable healthcare and housing. Black families span the economic gamut. Perhaps persuaded that Democrats had a better record on civil rights back in the day (and they didn’t, entirely) and, at the less prosperous end, sure that Democrats will toss out more freebies, about 90 per cent of black people have conventionally voted for the party of FDR. But that shifted in 2024, when a significant chunk of black men defected to Trump, along with a more significant chunk of Hispanic men.
Whatever you think of Trump, this is politically healthy. Beyond the obvious historical explanation, there’s no reason why black Americans should all plump for the same party, any more than culturally conservative Catholics from Central America should necessarily support abortion rights and men in dresses competing in women’s sports. Politically, black Americans are demonstrably heterogeneous. The sage Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes of the Free Press, Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal and Glenn Loury of the Glenn Show, to cite but a few, all testify to a lively right-of-centre black commentariat.
But may we speak to gerrymandering in general? The loathsome practice is getting completely out of control, and it’s quite a contest which major party has sunk closer to the bottom of the moral barrel here. So long as inventive cartologists draw districts as if designing psychedelic posters from the 1960s, it’s sometimes possible to deny a state’s supporters of the party out of power any representation whatsoever.
Take California. In the 2024 presidential election, only 58 per cent of Californian voters opted for Kamala Harris. Yet the state’s delegation to the House of Representatives currently comprises 42 Democrats and only seven Republicans. Worse, a redistricted map voters approved last year is expected to flip five or six of those few Republican seats to Democrats, leaving the nearly 40 per cent of Californians who voted for Trump with perhaps a single representative in Congress – out of a delegation of 52.
Despite the Dems’ indignant waffle about its being endangered, this isn’t democracy, and if democracy is truly endangered, the Democrats as much as anyone are doing the endangering. This ruthless winner-takes-all struggle further drives the new segregation – not between black and white people but between Democrats and Republicans. Self-sorting will thus only increase the number of all-red and all-blue states, as partisans square off and retrench to political ghettos. This leaves general elections uncompetitive, with the real contests in low-turnout primaries, which commonly benefit party extremists.
Gerrymandering is naked, unembarrassed cheating. It’s abuse of power
Americans consistently poll as quite disliking gerrymandering. Yet when given a chance to vote on the matter, they too often endorse contorted congressional maps that give their side an advantage (most recently, in California and Virginia). No one in this scenario has any principles, not even the voters, who also prioritise getting their way over fairness and loyalty to the spirit of their constitution. One solution – to remove the map-making power from politicians to an independent, nonpartisan body – CA had actually installed. But anti-Trump sentiment prevailed over decency last year, and Californians voted to overthrow the more even-handed system they’d previously voted for.
Long indulged by both parties, gerrymandering is naked, unembarrassed cheating. It’s abuse of power. If not strictly unconstitutional, it is anti-constitutional. And like shoplifting in the UK, once everyone is doing it, you’re a fool not to.
As for politics and race in the States, there’s no good reason black Americans should have voted for Kamala because she’s partly black any more than I should have voted for Trump because he’s white. Soon enough all Americans will be minorities, and rather than huddling in our own rivalrous camps, we’ll be better off getting over ourselves, intermarrying, and for God’s sake ceasing to report on opinion polls and electoral results by race. Let’s can ‘the black vote’ and ‘the Hispanic vote’ as meaningless relics of a way of thinking that went nowhere good.
And as for the racial protectionism the Supremes just rejected, it’s now unnecessary. The number of black Congressmen and women mirrors the black proportion of the population. Countless big city mayoralties are held by black politicians: LA, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, until recently San Francisco and NY. So if we’re worried about ‘minorities’, the folks truly threatened with oppression and lack of representation in the US these days aren’t black people suffering from some sneakily perpetuated Jim Crow laws, but political minorities marooned in states dominated by unconscionable, power-hungry cut-throats in the opposing party.
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