The Price of Union
NOVEMBER 2, 2015 ISSUE
BY NICHOLAS LEMANN
... A frequent companion of the idea of a simple distinction between black and white is the idea of a simple distinction between racists and non-racists. There can’t be anybody left who believes that racists exist only in the South, but there are plenty of people, especially white people, who believe that racism is another simple binary and that they dwell on the better side of it. Paul Theroux marvels that Strom Thurmond, the old South Carolina arch-segregationist, fathered an out-of-wedlock black child. “Funny that a racist like Thurmond would have an affair with his black servant,” he remarks to someone he’s visiting. Come on! It’s visually evident how often this happened — “racism” as manifest in a sense of sexual entitlement, rather than of revulsion ...
... the passage of the Voting Rights Act was actually a North-South partnership, not an imposition of the North’s will on the South. And it would be a big mistake to think of the act as a great, enduring civil-rights milestone, representing the country’s belated decision to comply fully and everywhere with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As Berman demonstrates, the act has been, instead, the subject of half a century of ceaseless contention, leaving its meaning permanently undetermined. Most of the consequential fights about civil rights, beginning with the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, have been over the federal government’s role in enforcement. The Voting Rights Act gives Washington the power to review local voter-registration practices, and to change the boundaries of election districts in areas that have a history of discrimination or that appear to be drawing district lines so as to minimize the number of black elected officials. But the act, as written, invites conflict because its enforcement provisions come up for periodic congressional review.
Every few years, there has been a serious attempt to discontinue these enforcement provisions. Berman makes a persuasive case that the ongoing battles over the reviews of the Voting Rights Act, beginning with the first one, in 1970, have had a major impact on who has held political power. Periods of aggressive enforcement have produced more black voters and more liberal (especially black) elected officials—including, Berman suggests, Barack Obama—and also the potential for conservative politicians to take advantage of white resentment of the Voting Rights Act.
In August of 1980, Ronald Reagan chose to kick off his general-election Presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, in Mississippi, not far from where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, and to declare, “I believe in states’ rights.” Once Reagan was in office, there was a battle over the terms of one of the Voting Rights Act’s periodic extensions, in which a significant actor was John Roberts, then a young lawyer at the Justice Department and now the Chief Justice. Berman has found in the National Archives a set of memos that Roberts wrote in 1981 and 1982, demonstrating a passionate opposition to aggressive enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Three decades later, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts led a Supreme Court majority that struck down the major enforcement provision of the act, arguing that the problem the act was passed to correct has long since been solved. This will help Republicans in subsequent elections, including the 2016 Presidential election ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/the-price-of-union
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