Hacks in Black Robes Ignored Racial Concerns
By Nicholas von Hoffman
In a few days, whilst Laura Bush holds up a Bible, Bill Rehnquist will look across its open pages at the face of the man whom he and his four pals made President. Then he will administer the oath of office to the little Texan.
The act will have been consummated, but no amount of sonorous incantation and invoking the Foresight of the Founding Fathers and the Wisdom of the Framers will lessen the conviction of millions that five black-robed mothersuckers have given them a royal fucking.
Be that as it may, the bull-ditty of stand-pat, stay-still politics blares from every lamppost. The noise of do-nothing, say-nothing, move-nothing, change-nothing politics is deafening.
Your honors, I offer as evidence of this thesis the following words published in The New York Times, written by God knows what hack and signed by an ancient quartet of former office holders, Howard H. Baker Jr., John C. Danforth, Sam Nunn and Robert S. Strauss: "America, showing the sagacity of our founding fathers and the Constitution they created, has weathered a storm that would have sunk less stable ships. The conduct of the people since Nov. 7 is a tribute to the country. The wisdom and sensitivity of the statements ... by Vice President Al Gore and President-elect George W. Bush should set the tone for a time of healing." These caricature politicians go on to say, "What the American people are looking for is not confrontation but rather consensus, not militancy but moderation .... The agenda should not be the platform of Philadelphia or the platform of Los Angeles. It should be the politics of moderation that the American people, in their wisdom, endorsed on Nov. 7."
The clonky language aside, I wonder how these antique worthies know what the hell the American people want. Who told them? How did they, in their wisdom, find out? Not from the election returns; they are under dispute. Even as the formulaic, high-toned chanting about unity, healing, putting "it" behind us and ending divisiveness, etc., gets tom-tommed from every broadcasting tower, the smell, the suspicion and the resentment grow.
Just before Christmas, Newsweek reported that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had a fecal fit on election night when Mr. Gore was declared the winner in Florida (a projection that lasted no more than 90 minutes or so) because, the 70-year-old Republican judge was overheard to say, she would now have to postpone her retirement in order to keep her seat out of Democratic hands. Only a few days later, this jurist with an intense personal interest in the outcome would sit on the election case and—ain't we surprised?—vote for her retirement back home to Arizona.
Next were rumors hanging like cigar smoke in a closed room, rumors explaining why Miami-Dade County never hand-counted its thousands of disputed ballots. Rumor hath it that certain Democratic politicians prevented the counting in return for a Republican promise that no indictments would be pursued in certain unspecified, unrelated criminal matters. Given Miami-Dade's recent history of corruption and turmoil, the rumor doesn't strain credulity.
Beyond all, race hangs over this election as it was decided first in Florida and then in a Washington courtroom. The four farti antigui cited above prescribe that "The new president and the new Congress, in a spirit of bipartisanship and common sense, must tell powerful groups within their respective ranks, representing important elements of their political bases, that their ideological agendas will not shape American policy in 2001 and 2002." By "ideological agendas," the old alligators mean that the black people, in particular, should stuff it. (The word "ideology," whenever it is used by bipartisan oligarchs, can be reliably translated to mean "African-American concerns.")
I would imagine it would be hard for African-Americans in Florida—the seat of two of the three worst race riots in the recent past—to heed the advice of these wizened white men. Black people made an enormous effort in the Florida elections. Black voting was up an astounding 65 percent over 1996! One of the reasons was fury against George Bush's brother Jeb, the governor of Florida and a man who is seen by black people there as a dedicated anti-African-American. So many blacks registered and voted (more than 800,000) that a state assumed to be safely Republican was turned into an electoral cockpit where we can't decide even now which rooster won. All we know is that eyes were pecked out and blood was spilled. You would think that under the emotional circumstances of the Florida election, the utmost care would have been taken to see that every ballot was correctly counted.
Far from it. After the election, The Washington Post did a precinct-by-precinct analysis of whose votes got counted and whose didn't. After looking at the returns from north Florida's Duval County, the newspaper reported that "In the most heavily white precincts, about 1 in 14 ballots were thrown out, but in largely black precincts more than 1 in 5 ballots were spoiled—and in some black precincts it was almost one-third. (By comparison, in the District of Columbia, fewer than 1 in 50 ballots were not counted as votes for president.)" The paper also reported that in those "Miami-Dade County precincts where fewer than 30 percent of the voters are black, about 3 percent of ballots did not register a vote for president. In precincts where more than 70 percent of the voters are African-American, it was nearly 10 percent."
You don't have to have been a Gore voter—I was not—to be troubled that Mr. Bush got in only because thousands of black votes were not counted.
The reason given for the discrepancies is that some blacks were too dumb, too ignorant or too careless to follow instructions as the smart, educated and careful white people did. In light of the racial history of the United States, it beggars belief that the Supreme Court, of all places (considering its role in that selfsame history), would pick a winner in the election without so much as a glance at what had happened to thousands of black voters. The dumb/ignorant/careless argument has been used for decades to prevent black people from voting. Why in hell do those Supreme Court dodos think that the March to Selma is memorialized every year? What was going on in their thick, selfish and political—or is it dumb, ignorant and careless—heads?
When the Court took the responsibility of the election on itself, it also took on the responsibility of the election's integrity in the eyes of everyone, of every race and persuasion. The Court should have ordered a re-count supervised by an interracial committee of masters in chancellery. If it was legitimate to disallow black votes at the cost of the black voters' candidate losing, then blacks should have certified to it.
Instead, the lawyers representing Mr. Gore and the Democrats—and therefore, by extension, the African-American voters—made it easy for the four white Republican judges and the one black Republican judge to turn an election into a selection of their fellow party member. The Democratic lawyers were so inept that they allowed the Republicans to take the equal-protection clause of the Constitution—the clause which has been used so often to uphold the rights of blacks and other minorities—and use it in favor of white Republican voters.
This strange turn of affairs could not have happened had Laurence Tribe and David Boies, the Democratic mouthpieces, not been so enamored with the law's trivia; they presented a case about chads and dimples, but not about blacks and whites, about race and justice. So for three hours, these two men stood in front of the Supreme Court and looked up at the nine empty black robes and never mentioned race. This whole struggle had come down to race—and nothing but race—and these guys thought it was about section number this and paragraph number that and Humperdumper v. Popsnyder, U.S. Circuit blah-blah, 1938 et al. These two characters were given dozens of hours of free television time by every network, and not once did they understand that this was a political proceeding, not a legal one; not once did they understand that the election had come down to the politics of race in America.
Had Mr. Tribe and Mr. Boies stood on those many courthouse steps in front of those many television cameras and spoken over and over again about race, about who was getting screwed and who was doing the screwing, the Court could never, ever have come down with that ruling. It was time for these two proper white lawyers to play the race card, and play it responsibly and honestly, and they were too taken up with the minor minutiae of their tiresome calling to realize that the clock had sounded the moment to stop being lawyers and become advocates of the people.
Instead, it was left to the dreadful Alan Dershowitz to jump in front of the cameras and tell his slow-witted fellow counselors at law that this was a political case which had to be tried politically. It fell to him to explain that this was about racial justice, not mandamuses and estoppels. No one listened much, because every day Alan Dershowitz pays the price of having made himself into the living emblem of everything we hate about lawyers.
It was left to the Reverend Jesse Jackson to explain that this was about race, truly about race—and, for once, it wasn't a racket, it wasn't a self-serving deal, it wasn't one of those see-me-see-how-big-and-loud my-mouth-is operations. It was he who shouted about justice until his throat was red and the words he spoke were sounded with a hoarse grrr. Nobody white listened much, because Mr. Jackson has become a walking advertisement for himself and nobody has time to sort out which of what he says is truth and which is kapok.
For the time being, as the two men's eyes—the kingmaker and the king—meet over the Bible, the complacent choirs of yea-sayers and time-servers lift their voices in bipartisan anthems. The Panglossian chorus of media personalities sing their psalms of civic unity, but this business is not done. It is not over yet.
[end]
Carl
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