I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.
The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.
It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.
The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.
There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)
The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.
Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.
> you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing. You are making the same argument as mid-century racist policymakers that were defeated by the VRA. Back then you would argue that Poll taxes and voter tests aren't illegal, they just prevent the indigent and uneducated from voting. Well those policies were the beating heart of Jim Crow, which the VRA intended to defeat.
You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities". Well we've been there. It's been illegal to make laws directly against racial groups since reconstruction. This is why much of Jim Crow was built on a foundation of targeting adjacent traits rather than race specifically, and why many lament the defanging of the VRA.
>Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing.
You can't say this with a straight face. Before the civil rights act we literally had white's only sections of businesses. Separate-but-unequal was the apartheid of the South. That just doesn't exist anymore in any kind of open and accepted way, thank god.
>You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities".
Again, I'm not saying that at all, the Supreme Court isn't saying that either. You are again conflating minorities as a singular voting bloc with a singular voting interest. The entire point here is that there is plenty of evidence that this is about politics, not about race.
I think gerrymandering is atrocious. I think we should move to a proportional voting system where gerrymandering is no longer achievable. The idea that 25% of a population can dictate government control to the other 75% of the population by drawing arbitrary lines is atrocious. I just think it's quite clear that this isn't happening to suppress the vote along racial lines.
The idea here is that I think it's quite plausible that black republicans are being used along gerrymandering line to help elect republicans. If it were about race... then black republicans would also need to be disenfranchised.
Jim Crow was very obviously terrible... it was also very overt and obvious. I grew up in Texas, and the idea that the right is a secret cabal of racists trying to create some kind of white government is insane. The idea that the general socioeconomic concerns of the black community put most black voters on the political left makes vastly more sense, and it also explains the significantly larger numbers of Hispanic representatives on the Texas right.
It's not one data point. There is plenty of evidence that this is about politics... not about race.
The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.
It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.
I say this as a lefty.