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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Nation: How the GOP Is Resegregating the South
North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield was born in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote for African-Americans. He grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and moved to North Carolina when he was stationed at Fort Bragg. He became an Army doctor, opening a practice in Fayetteville after leaving the service. Mansfield says he was always very cynical about politics but decided to run for office in 2010 after being inspired by Barack Obamas presidential run.
He ran a grassroots campaign in the Obama mold, easily winning the election with 67 percent of the vote. He represented a compact section of northwest Fayetteville that included Fort Bragg and the most populous areas of the city. It was a socioeconomically diverse district, comprising white and black and rich and poor sections of the city. Though his district had a black voting age population (BVAP) of 45 percent, Mansfield, who is African-American, lives in an old, affluent part of town that he estimates is 90 percent white. Many of his neighbors are also his patients.
But after the 2010 census and North Carolinas once-per-decade redistricting processwhich Republicans control by virtue of winning the states General Assembly for the first time since the McKinley administrationMansfields district looks radically different. It resembles a fat squid, its large head in an adjoining rural county with little in common with Mansfields previously urban district, and its long tentacles reaching exclusively into the black neighborhoods of Fayetteville. The BVAP has increased from 45 to 51 percent, as white voters were surgically removed from the district and placed in a neighboring Senate district represented by a white Republican whom GOP leaders want to protect in 2012. Mansfields own street was divided in half, and he no longer represents most of the people in his neighborhood. His new district spans 350 square miles, roughly the distance from Fayetteville to Atlanta. Thirty-three voting precincts in his district have been divided to accommodate the influx of new black voters. My district has never elected a nonminority state senator, even though minorities were never more than 45 percent of the vote, Mansfield says. I didnt need the help. I was doing OK.
Mansfields district is emblematic of how the redistricting process has changed the political complexion of North Carolina, as Republicans attempt to turn this racially integrated swing state into a GOP bastion, with white Republicans in the majority and black Democrats in the minority for the next decade. Were having the same conversations we had forty years ago in the South, that black people can only represent black people and white people can only represent white people, says Mansfield. Id hope that in 2012 wed have grown better than that. Before this year, for example, there were no Senate districts with a BVAP of 50 percent or higher. Now there are nine. A lawsuit filed by the NAACP and other advocacy groups calls the redistricting maps an intentional and cynical use of race that exceeds what is required to ensure fairness to previously disenfranchised racial minority voters. .......(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/165976/how-gop-resegregating-south
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The Nation: How the GOP Is Resegregating the South (Original Post)
marmar
Feb 2012
OP
orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)1. Antebellum ,isn't a period in history
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)2. k+r. nt
JCMach1
(27,572 posts)3. Maybe it is time to think about proportional representation in legislatures...
Our party is often getting the shite beaten out of it over re-apportionment.
The computer systems that draw the lines can do anything these days.
Literally, you can tell it you want a 90% Republican district shaped like Mickey Mouse in Orlando and they can do that.
The technology is actually subverting democracy.
I live here and besides pitting sitting Democrats against each other, they have created whole districts made up of one race and another. But since the right has the courts, it seems we can't defeat them on legal grounds.