ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.” The president and others on the left wanted the court to ignore the fact that, as Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.” Roberts took Congress to task for pretending that nothing had changed in nearly half a century, writing:
By the time the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored. During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers. And yet the coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs.
What do the current data show? Among other things, the statistics reveal that black voter registration is higher in the South than it is in other regions of the country. They show that the racial gap in voter registration and turnout is lower in the states originally covered under Section 5 than it is nationwide. Finally, they show that black turnout now exceeds white turnout in five of those six states, and that in the sixth state the disparity is less than one-half of one percent. In other words, it shows tremendous voting-rights progress.
The political left, led by Obama, played down this racial progress and expressed disappointment with the outcome of the case, but their dismay had nothing to do with any fear that black access to balloting was in jeopardy. After all, most of the Voting Rights Act is permanent, and those who feel that a voting procedure is racially discriminatory still have legal recourse. What really concerns liberals is that the ruling could make it more difficult for them to use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee certain election results. As Roger Clegg and Joshua Thompson, who filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, explained, “the principal use that federal civil-rights officials now make of Section 5 is to require racially gerrymandered and racially segregated voting districts.” The argument is that racial minorities are entitled to a proportionate number of voting districts in which they are the majority. “Think about how far from the ideals of the civil-rights movement the Left’s definition of civil rights has led us,” wrote Clegg and Thompson. “Universities must be able to discriminate against students on the basis of skin color, and voters must be required to vote only among those of their own kind.”29
The irony is that these efforts to go beyond the original intent of the Voting Rights Act in the name of helping blacks politically have almost certainly hampered blacks politically by limiting their appeal to nonblack voters. By creating “safe” black districts, racial gerrymandering has facilitated racial polarization and hyperpartisanship. Minority candidates have less incentive to make appeals to people outside of their racial or ethnic voting base, so winning statewide becomes more difficult. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus typically have voting records that are more liberal than the average white Democrat. “Black political progress might be greater today had the race-based districting been viewed as a temporarily needed remedy for unmistakably racist voting in the region that was only reluctantly accepting blacks as American citizens,” wrote Thernstrom. Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, “elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.”30
One reason that returns on black political investment have been so meager is that black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but don’t represent the concerns of most blacks. So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. “Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America,” wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites. 31
As more blacks have joined the American mainstream over the past half century, this disconnect between the black politicians and civil rights leadership and the people they supposedly represent has only grown. Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates.
And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism—something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie. 32
For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods. School choice is another area where black politicians continue to oppose policies overwhelmingly supported by black voters in general and the black underclass in particular. In 2012 voters in Georgia approved Amendment 1, a ballot initiative to expand school choice in the form of charter schools in a state where one-third of high-school freshmen failed to graduate in four years. Black voters were the strongest backers of the initiative, which passed 59 percent to 41 percent. “One of the most striking results of the vote on Amendment 1,” wrote journalist Douglas Blackmon, “is the absolutely extraordinary level of support received from African-American voters.” The measure was supported by 61 percent of voters in the twenty Georgia counties where blacks are half of the population. And in the thirteen counties that comprise more than half of the state’s black population, support was an even higher 62 percent. “The bottom line: Georgia’s black counties overwhelmingly desire dramatic new alternatives to the conventional school systems that have failed them for more than a century,” wrote Blackmon.
That level of support flatly contradicts one of the flimsiest canards used to criticize Amendment 1—and charter schools in general. That is: the idea that somehow charter schools end up hurting minority or poorer students while disproportionately helping white and middle class children. The actual performance of charter schools in Georgia has always defied such claims. African-American students and all children living in urban areas with failed conventional public schools, like Atlanta, have benefited far more from charters than any other groups.33
Yet within a week of the amendment’s passage, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus joined a lawsuit to block expansion of charter schools in the state.34
Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented—some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance—it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America. C. T. Vivian, a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., told Obama biographer David Remnick that “Martin Luther King was our prophet—in biblical terms, the prophet of our age. The politician of our age, who comes along to follow that prophet, is Barack Obama. Martin laid the moral and spiritual base for the political reality to follow.” Since the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, wrote Remnick,
the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence . . . he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view. 35
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