In Voting Rights-and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, Abigail Thernstrom explores the complex issues raised by the Voting Rights Act today. Thernstrom celebrates the landmark 1965 law that opened southern voting booths to African Americans-while challenging its evolution into a tool to create a racially fair distribution of political power.

Federal law now requires states to draw majority-minority legislative districts, giving minority voters a uniquely sheltered status. Color-conscious policies were morally justified when the only alternative was the perpetuation of all-white or overwhelmingly white legislatures. Today, such race-conscious districting may create less-rather than more-integrated politics.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act is the crown jewel of American civil rights legislation. Its passage marked the death knell of the Jim Crow South. But that was the beginning, not the end, of an important debate on race and representation in American democracy. When is the distribution of political power racially fair? Who counts as a representative of black and Hispanic interests? How we answer such questions shapes our politics and public policy in profound but often unrecognized ways.

The act's original aim was simple: Give African Americans the same political opportunity enjoyed by other citizens--the chance to vote, form political coalitions, and elect the candidates of their choice. But in the racist South, it soon became clear that access to the ballot would not, by itself, provide the political opportunity the statute promised. Most southern whites were unwilling to vote for black candidates, and southern states were ready to alter electoral systems to maintain white supremacy.

In this provocative book, Abigail Thernstrom argues that southern resistance to black political power began a process by which the act was radically revised both for good and ill. Congress, the courts, and the Justice Department altered the statute to ensure the election of blacks and Hispanics to legislative bodies ranging from school boards and county councils to the U.S. Congress. Proportional racial representation--equality of results rather than mere equal opportunity--became the revised aim of the act. Blacks came to be treated as politically different--entitled to inequality in the form of a unique political privilege.

Majority-minority districts that reserved seats for blacks and Hispanics succeeded in integrating southern politics. By now, however, those districts may perversely limit the potential power of black officeholders. "Max-black" districts typically elect candidates to the left of most voters; those officeholders rarely win in majority-white settings. Such race-conscious districting discourages the development of centrist, "post-racial" candidates like Barack Obama (who was defeated when he stood for Congress in one such district).

The Voting Rights Act has become a period piece that today serves to keep most black legislators clustered on the sidelines of American politics--precisely the opposite of what its framers intended. A radically revised law would better serve the political interests of all Americans--minority and white voters alike.

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Paperback: 250 pages
Author: Abigail Thernstrom
Publisher: AEI Press; 1 edition (July 25, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0844742724
ISBN-13: 978-0844742724

INTRODUCTION
As I write, Barack Obama has just become the first black leader of the free world, winner of an election in which his race was clearly no barrier, and may well have been an advantage. He won a larger share of the white vote than the previous two nominees of his party, and, for the first time in history, African-American turnout at the polls may have been higher than the rate for whites.

President Obama’s victory is unmistakably the end of an era and the welcome beginning of a new one. Whatever one thinks of his politics, his stunning success is a historic turning point. Integration was the aim of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, and, by the ultimate test, American politics is now integrated. Blacks have been a major force in American politics for decades—and now they have reached its highest peak.

Obama’s victory contradicted everything most black voters had long been led to believe. Even as his candidacy began to take off, the word on the street was still that most whites would never vote for a black. America in black and white, separate and unequal—that was still the conventional wisdom, particularly in African-American circles. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Abigail Thernstrom is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, vice-chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and a member of the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Juan Williams, author of the foreword, is one of the nation's leading journalists. He is a senior correspondent for National Public Radio and a regular contributor to Fox News Sunday.

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