Defending Multiracial Values
Stomping Clarence Thomas is a mainstream activity in Washington, D.C., not much more controversial than jogging.
Benjamin Chavis, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recently patronized Thomas as a woeful backslider who had lost his way. On the other hand, Chavis is willing to welcome and embrace Louis Farrakhan, who, despite his violent anti-Semitism and many crackpot notions, has apparently not lost his way.
Much of the recent stomping is a reaction to Thomas’ 59-page opinion in a Georgia civil rights case, Holder vs. Hall. Thomas strongly rejected racial apportionment and racial gerrymandering. Ted Shaw, director of litigation for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, complained that Thomas is “hostile to the Voting Rights Act as it has been construed.”
Several black officeholders considered it the last straw. Rep. Cleo Fields, D-La., said, “After this opinion, there is no hope” for Thomas. One of Thomas’ arguments, that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 does not compel the creation of “racially safe boroughs,” was dismissed by Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., as “the silliest thing I ever heard of.”
This burst of anti-Thomas criticism had the flavor of excommunication. Thomas’ opinion was aimed directly at the orthodoxy of the civil rights establishment. The strategy of the establishment, which has hardened into ideology, is focused on race-conscious approaches - gerrymandering, setasides, quotas, race-norming and, inevitably, racial balkanization.
Though the establishment has worked very hard to depict Thomas as a racial heretic, on this issue he speaks for a lot of Americans, black and white, left and right, who are deeply concerned about where race-based policies are taking us. In fact, his opinion in Holder vs. Hall is a strong and valuable analysis of some of these policies and their likely long-term consequences.
Thomas argues that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has evolved into a charter for a permanently divisive political spoils system. By judicial sleight of hand, he says, a law specifically barring proportional representation has been converted into a mandate for allotting seats according to racial proportions or percentages.
Washington Post columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. was one of the first to challenge the excommunication of Thomas for deviating from groupthink. Yoder pointed out that none of Thomas’ critics had bothered to meet his arguments head-on, resorting instead to ad hominem attacks.
One argument that has to be taken seriously is that the gerrymandering that created safe black districts has the effect of creating safe white districts nearby. As Yoder notes, North Carolina’s 3rd congressional district can now be described as “lily-white.” That’s because it has been stripped of black voters to create a famously contorted safe, black district that ignores all natural communities and snakes 160 miles down a highway. As one state legislator noted, “If you drove down the interstate with both car doors open, you’d kill most of the people in the district.”
The North Carolina gerrymandering led to the Supreme Court’s ambivalent decision in Shaw vs. Reno, allowing challenges to racial districting. Racial gerrymandering, Justice Sandra O’Connor wrote, threatens to “carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters,” and it “may balkanize us into competing factions.” Safe seats clearly benefit the people who get to fill them. But it’s not obvious that they benefit blacks, or anyone else, in the long run.
In Holder vs. Hall, Justice Thomas wrote, “As a practical political matter, our drive to segregate political districts by race can only serve to deepen racial divisions by destroying any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.”
The views of the civil rights establishment are based on some deep pessimism - that coalitions won’t work and whites won’t vote for nonwhites. So the expectation of racial separation is being built into our basic political structure.
The assumption that Americans are defined mainly, or solely, by race is being built in too. Abigail Thernstrom, author of “Whose Votes Count?” notes that all four Supreme Court justices who dissented in Shaw vs. Reno assumed that black Americans are one group with distinct interests. With other groups, we routinely acknowledge complicated and divided loyalties based on income, religion, class or place of residence. Thernstrom asks: “Do all blacks, wherever they live and whatever their income, share the same interests? Are African Americans, in effect, a nation within a nation - a separate people, unrepresented except by one of their own?”
The policy of creating electoral “homelands” for blacks seems to assume so. In effect, Justice Thomas was hit so hard for questioning the inwardlooking black solidarity that has overtaken the civil rights establishment. Alas, he was punished for looking beyond political Bantustans toward a multiracial America that works.