Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction.

Abstract

Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. By J. Morgan Kousser. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1999. Pp. xii, 590. Paper $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-4738-0; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8078-2431-2.) Civil rights activists had a rough time trying to translate the principles of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into actual practice. Southern politicians had a genius for diluting the black vote--by countermobilizing previously unregistered white voters, then by changing election rules (redrawing district boundaries, requiring run-offs, etc.). Of the two strategies, changing the rules was both more effective and more unambiguously unethical, and civil rights activists sought to make it illegal. They succeeded in pressuring the courts and Congress to ban some racist forms of vote dilution, but the bans proved hard to enforce. Racist aims were easy to hide and were typically mixed with varying degrees of legal aims--protection of incumbents during redistricting, for example. (However opportunistic, such protection is virtually inevitable and generally legal.) These and other complexities led civil rights lobbyists to push legislatures into drawing new election districts with safe black majorities. The new districts looked very odd to casual observers, but the history behind them makes them look less odd. Years of ingenious resistance to black power make many of the oddities appear justified. J. Morgan Kousser, the most influential historian of Fifteenth Amendment rights, makes these points in his new book. His principle antagonist, Abigail M. Thernstrom, had already made most of them in her influential Whose Votes Count? (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). Given their bitter disagreement, how much the two have in common is striking. Like Kousser, Thernstrom argues that many of the judicial and Congressional steps between the act of 1965 and the so-called judicial gerrymanders that became controversial in the 1980s were necessary to overcome stubborn resistance to the clear intent of the act. Kousser thinks the story should end there. Thernstrom, however, wants readers to see a larger irony. However justifiable any step along the way may have been, she concludes that a general pattern emerged: proportional representation, which was undemocratic, indeed deeply racist. To avoid prosecution, legislatures were herding black voters into districts on the assumption that those voters could get legitimate representation only where they outnumbered white voters. The perversity of this became clearest when right-wing Republicans used the civil rights lobby's rhetoric to justify draining black voters (overwhelmingly Democratic) out of competitive districts and packing them into a small number of districts that they conceded to the Democrats. The Republicans' idea was to reduce the number of Democratic representatives yet claim moral high ground by increasing the number of black representatives. Civil rights groups had little defense against this tactical twist, and the increasingly Republican judiciary predictably took full advantage. Thernstrom thinks such overall consequences are now the most interesting parts of the story. Kousser thinks they are a distraction. To him, the god of racial justice is in the details. Kousser's book--every bit as polemical and tendentious as Thernstrom's--insists on the necessity of racial gerrymandering. History, he says, shows that general principles of fairness can conceal devious acts. …