Column: Don't let the New York Times fool you about GOP gerrymandering
All of this is disgusting of course, but even more disgusting has been seeing our captured national media frame this crisis in terms of a political horse race. The New York Times declared SCOTUS’ Alabama ruling “a victory for Republicans.” Not content to whitewash merely that injustice, the paper also published a longform analysis of the broader picture on Saturday with the vomitous subhed, “Republicans are charging ahead in the nation’s redistricting race, and showing new bullishness after months of growing midterm fears.” The Times always loves to talk about what this flagrant evildoing means for the Democrats, and not for democracy itself, and its takeaways from this crisis were no different. A few miles due south, the editorial board at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post took time out of its day to voice its support for the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision, because Bezos prizes darkness far more than he does democracy.
So not only are you and I being subjected to a coordinated plan by the GOP to nullify this fall’s election results before Americans have even gotten a chance to vote, but also to an accompanying disinformation campaign from the establishment media to posit this as just another political tussle. It is not. It is villainy, villainy of the crassest sort. Thus, it’s incumbent upon other journalists such as myself to explain what’s happening here in clearer terms. So here I go.
In the year 1870, in the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the federal government approved the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted Black men the right to vote (women’s suffrage would come later). Sorry to play middle school teacher here, but that amendment states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Clear enough, yeah?
This country’s embittered whites didn’t like that new policy one bit. So they schemed their way into blunting its impact by passing the now infamous Jim Crow laws, which codified segregation and — more important to the topic currently at hand — disenfranchised otherwise eligible Black voters by subjecting them to poll taxes, literacy tests or cumbersome voter ID laws. It took nearly 100 more years before Jim Crow was formally outlawed thanks to the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, parts of which were written, and later amended, to explicitly state that the right of Black voters could neither be denied nor abridged. Gerrymandering, in which government officials redraw voting district boundaries in a manner that is demographically favorable to them, is one of the oldest and nastiest ways to abridge that right. It’s nigh impossible to prevent gerrymandering altogether, but the VRA was written to curtail the practice as much as was feasible.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/gerrymandering-republicans-midterms-22257260.php
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