Transcript: Trump and the Supreme Court Are Crushing Black Power

Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left

Summary

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 8 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.These are two people I really enjoy talking to, but we’re talking to them at a time that’s not that great. Literally about an hour ago, Tennessee voted to eliminate their majority-Black congressional district. You’re seeing Alabama, South Carolina, a bunch of states talking about doing that after the Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting—almost invalidating—the Voting Rights Act. So we’re going to talk about the fallout from that and what it means for Black representation. Thanks, guys, for joining me.Hakeem Jefferson: Thanks for having us. Glad to be here, Perry.Bacon: Hakeem, just talk about that first of all.Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.Bacon: The question I want to ask you all specifically is: Alito, Roberts, the Supreme Court is basically saying that Black people are Democrats, so gerrymandering is about partisanship, and so it’s fine if we get rid of all the Black congressional districts because those are just Democrats. And the Republicans won the majority in those states, so they get to draw the lines. So why does it matter that Black representation goes down in these states?Jefferson: Thanks again for having us, Perry. I’m going to let Jake, because Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the sort of foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists, I think, and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. So I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.But at the top: the Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective—if not one of the most effective—pieces of legislation in the country’s history. The sort of post–Civil War amendments were meant to enshrine these rights for Black folk. But we know, across the American South in particular, there were these attempts to burden the franchise for Black people. The Voting Rights Act comes along and helps to ensure that Black people got to enjoy access to the ballot without the burdens that lots of local jurisdictions tried to put in front of them.And so it just so happens I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. And she, early on, was thinking about: what’s the reason that we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter? And so we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts. And so we might expect, for example, that if Black representatives have life experiences that align with Black constituents, they might prioritize issues related to criminal justice. We might remember, for example, the leadership that many Black representatives had in the aftermath—this will sound long ago—of Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It was Black representatives who really put out the clarion call about whether a young Black man wearing a hoodie should confront death in the way that Trayvon did.So we might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs. You see in the Senate, for example, Black women really holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or maternal health—Black maternal health. And so we might expect that descriptive representation comes with some substantive purchase. And so the decline of Black representation is not only a slap in the face to the progress made for multiracial democracy, but we might worry that it will come with some substantive declines for issues that Black folks care about and that matter to them materially.Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. So today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—that kind of just helps explain why that’s a loss as well.Jefferson: Yeah. So when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, and we talk about Black folks having the right to select representatives of their choice—that choice needn’t be a descriptive member of the group. It doesn’t mean that—it’s often the case that Black folks who are voting for members of Congress, given residential segregation and the like, perhaps that choice would be a Black representative.

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Transcript: Trump and the Supreme Court Are Crushing Black Power
The New Republic

Transcript: Trump and the Supreme Court Are Crushing Black Power

Left

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 8 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.These are two people I really enjoy talking to, but we’re talking to them at a time that’s not that great. Literally about an hour ago, Tennessee voted to eliminate their majority-Black congressional district. You’re seeing Alabama, South Carolina, a bunch of states talking about doing that after the Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting—almost invalidating—the Voting Rights Act. So we’re going to talk about the fallout from that and what it means for Black representation. Thanks, guys, for joining me.Hakeem Jefferson: Thanks for having us. Glad to be here, Perry.Bacon: Hakeem, just talk about that first of all.Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.Bacon: The question I want to ask you all specifically is: Alito, Roberts, the Supreme Court is basically saying that Black people are Democrats, so gerrymandering is about partisanship, and so it’s fine if we get rid of all the Black congressional districts because those are just Democrats. And the Republicans won the majority in those states, so they get to draw the lines. So why does it matter that Black representation goes down in these states?Jefferson: Thanks again for having us, Perry. I’m going to let Jake, because Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the sort of foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists, I think, and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. So I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.But at the top: the Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective—if not one of the most effective—pieces of legislation in the country’s history. The sort of post–Civil War amendments were meant to enshrine these rights for Black folk. But we know, across the American South in particular, there were these attempts to burden the franchise for Black people. The Voting Rights Act comes along and helps to ensure that Black people got to enjoy access to the ballot without the burdens that lots of local jurisdictions tried to put in front of them.And so it just so happens I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. And she, early on, was thinking about: what’s the reason that we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter? And so we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts. And so we might expect, for example, that if Black representatives have life experiences that align with Black constituents, they might prioritize issues related to criminal justice. We might remember, for example, the leadership that many Black representatives had in the aftermath—this will sound long ago—of Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It was Black representatives who really put out the clarion call about whether a young Black man wearing a hoodie should confront death in the way that Trayvon did.So we might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs. You see in the Senate, for example, Black women really holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or maternal health—Black maternal health. And so we might expect that descriptive representation comes with some substantive purchase. And so the decline of Black representation is not only a slap in the face to the progress made for multiracial democracy, but we might worry that it will come with some substantive declines for issues that Black folks care about and that matter to them materially.Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. So today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—that kind of just helps explain why that’s a loss as well.Jefferson: Yeah. So when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, and we talk about Black folks having the right to select representatives of their choice—that choice needn’t be a descriptive member of the group. It doesn’t mean that—it’s often the case that Black folks who are voting for members of Congress, given residential segregation and the like, perhaps that choice would be a Black representative.

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