Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
Blacks should know their place, the media seem to think. Increasingly, they are leaving their natural habitat the inner city and wandering into residential areas where lots of non-blacks live, the Washington Post and other media outlets report with obvious distress. The black population is shrinking in urban congressional districts and swelling in suburban ones, they note. Indeed, looking at the newest census numbers, the 15 districts with the greatest black-population growth are all in the suburbs. Conversely, the African American population in eight of the top ten majority-black districts dropped by an average of more than 10 percent. There goes the neighborhood that is, the black ghetto. It isnt yet gone, but its going.
One might see that as excellent news. Its not, the mainstream media tell us. Residential segregation has long been considered the most important sign of miles to go on the road to racial equality, but the escape of blacks to the suburbs will make the creation of majority-black legislative districts harder to achieve. And yet such districts are essential to the integration of black politics, the conventional wisdom runs. Racial fairness makes them mandatory, those who interpret and enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act have long believed. Where demography is not propitious, the statute demands that, to the extent possible, state legislators draw gerrymandered districting lines to ensure safe black seats in numbers proportionate to the minority population. But if blacks keep scattering, as they are doing, black representation by black officeholders will inevitably become harder to ensure. A possible Justice Department response to the new, worrisome demographic picture is to insist on even more imaginative racial gerrymandering to recapture black voters who have fled cities for greener pastures, but a majority on the Supreme Court has voiced dismay over tortured race-driven lines. The Courts discomfort arises from constitutional concerns, but quite another question can also be asked: When black voters have been able to choose the traditional path of upward mobility and settle in a suburb, should the law be working to reunite those voters with the communities they made great efforts to escape?
