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Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Let’s truly bury racism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On ground where no black man has ever stood to take the oath, Barack Obama raises his right hand today to assume the office of president of the United States.
It is an extraordinary historical moment, a measure of how far this nation has come.
What does it mean? Plainly this: People and systems change. The political system that discriminated and the people who designed it are dead and gone. But that fact hasn’t been fully recognized yet.
Just days before the inauguration, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an important case regarding the Voting Rights Act, first passed back in 1965. The case involves a utility district in Texas created in 1987 with no history of discrimination, and whether its election laws should be subject to oversight by the U.S. Justice Department.
Such provisions under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act apply to nine states, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, in addition to cities and counties in seven others. All had been determined to have a history of discrimination, but that was long ago.
“The America that has elected Barack Obama … is far different than when Section 5 was first enacted in 1965,” argued a former solicitor general of Texas, Gregory S. Coleman, who brought the challenge on behalf of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One.
Indeed, every state in the nation is so dramatically different that “Congress cannot forever rely on findings of conditions that existed 30 years ago” to infringe “on the rights of an entire generation of voters who were not even alive when those discriminatory practices were ended,” lawyers for the district argue.
Continuing those burdensome provisions requires a belief that plots of earth are irredeemably stained by their history, a view that would forever taint much of the world’s space.
In 2006, however, Congress voted to extend federal oversight requirements for another 25 years. It did so not because of any evidence that conditions of two generations earlier still existed, but because of the politics of race and party advantage.
We see the same forces at work in Georgia today with the decision by the chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, state Rep. Al Willliams (D-Midway), to reintroduce a resolution insisting that the state offer an official apology for slavery. If such an apology was necessary, the new president or the Democratically controlled Congress could speedily issue it or make any other gesture that Williams and other Democrats think useful.
But, then, this is really not about apologies, is it? It’s about partisan advantage. In Georgia, the party in power is Republican.
That same sort of partisan gamesmanship has been at the core of the enormous hype Democrats have brought to the issue of proper voter identification.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled last week that Georgia’s voter ID law is entirely proper. Yes, the court acknowledged, presenting a government-issued ID is a bit of a burden. But it’s an “insignificant burden” when balanced against the state’s interest “in detecting and deterring voter fraud,” wrote Judge William H. Pryor Jr.
The decision relied on an April decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in an Indiana case that found, quite sanely, that “counting only the votes of eligible voters” is a legitimate state interest. Is, was, has been.
But then, the photo ID brouhaha was never about who votes and who doesn’t among the eligible. It was about stirring the racial pot for partisan advantage.
The hope of today’s historic milestone in the U.S. Capitol is that the nation can begin to move beyond the partisan games of race. The full force and authority of the United States is invested in Barack Obama. He and the Congress controlled by his party have the power to repair grievances if they are believed to be legitimate, to watch and prosecute those who are in fact attempting to corrupt the voting process, whether that occurs in Chicago, Minnesota or a utility district in Texas.
Then is not now and the law should recognize that.
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