In January unless something happens akin to a New York Jets’ Super Bowl victory, the U.S. House of Representatives will have no black Republicans.
And a lot fewer Republicans, period.
The only blacks — four — now on that side of the House aisle are headed to retirement or are seeking offices in their home states.
So long. Your party will not miss you.
The GOP may say otherwise, but with an openly racist and scheming president and another kidney blow to the Voting Rights Act that has Republicans crowing, the message to people of color is, “Seek employment elsewhere.”
If it’s true that, as the Roberts Court assumes, racial discrimination is a thing of the distant past, it’s time to change the initials GOP — Grand Old Party — to WPP: White Person’s Party. No need to pretend anymore.
How many things could a major political party do to tell minorities, “Get out”? The WPP has done them all.
It has dictated the abolition of learning materials that truly reflect America’s bitter racist past – the whole reason for the Voting Rights Act.
It has pressed for election laws based wholly on the myth of rampant voter fraud, but intended – as more than one federal judge has stated – to curb the votes of minorities.
Central to the Big Lie was this president’s assault on the ability and trustworthiness of people of color to administer elections. In condensed form, that lie was based on these scurrilous and hurtful assumptions: that black and brown people cheat when counting votes, and that “illegal” brown people swarmed the polls to tip the 2020 count.
Election fraud? By one person alone. If this president had not regained office, he would be on trial — the criminal kind — for his lie-a-minute attempt to overturn voters’ will.
His “stop the steal” claims with invented undercount numbers motivated supporters to assault the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021.
Race was the unspoken undertone then, but it is increasingly spoken by the Great Divider.
Not surprisingly, his Cabinet is the most homogeneous in several generations. His “war” secretary has purged the Pentagon’s upper ranks of black officers.
“DEI” — diversity, equity and inclusion — is a virtue to be prized by institutions that know minorities are underrepresented or poorly treated. “DEI” is not the crime the racist-in-chief would make it.
And so: A generic congressional ballot gives Republicans a whopping 6 percent of black Americans’ support. His support by Hispanics has tumbled precipitously.
Minorities see the Supreme Court further eroding the Voting Rights Act by unleashing the hounds of blatantly race-skewed gerrymandering in states with Republican legislative majorities.
What a sick irony that a black-majority congressional district in Louisiana is what the court conservatives say violated the “equal protection” clause and justifies further emasculating the Voting Rights Act.
Black people make up one-third of the population in Louisiana. They won’t have even a hint of parity in political power once unchecked political gerrymanders are drawn under the license now granted the White Person’s Party. It will happen throughout the South and wherever red rules.
Justice Elena Kagan is right. The ruling “will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”
Now it’s politics over principle. And the politics of the WPP, like the practitioners of Jim Crow, must be to beat back the tide in a world of difference.
Reckoning is coming their way.
For one instance, look at Texas, the impermeable red bastion. Many analysts say the mid-decade redistricting ordered by Greg Abbott at the ring of the Mass Deportation Master won’t deliver the congressional seats anticipated. Why? Simply because Latinos in South Texas who voted for this president last time won’t support him this time because of ICE horrors.
Then there’s James Talarico, the young Democratic star from Round Rock. Polls show him leading both Republican contenders in the Texas U.S. Senate race. You read that right.
Talarico campaigns on kinder, smarter, more unifying government. What a concept.
A government built on partisan payback, racist bile and rank incompetence is not looking so good.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
