More stories

  • in

    L.G.B.T.Q. Advocates Target Redistricting Ahead of 2022 Election

    A national organization dedicated to increasing the number of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans who hold elected office began an effort on Wednesday to lobby states and localities to keep gay neighborhoods united as they begin the once-a-decade process of redrawing congressional districts and other political boundaries.The group, the L.G.B.T.Q. Victory Fund, will push entities tasked with redistricting to consider gay communities as “communities of interest,” or populations with shared political priorities. Its campaign, called “We Belong Together,” was announced a day before the Census Bureau is expected to release data that will be used to inform redistricting.“We’re a distinct population, and our voices need to be heard in government,” said Sean Meloy, the vice president of political programs at the Victory Fund. “We’re trying to empower more people to make that argument to their respective redistricting entity.”In the redistricting process, the officials redrawing a state’s political lines often consider the impact of dividing groups that have shared political interests. Grouping such communities into so-called opportunity districts enables those voters to elect candidates of their choice. Black and Latino Americans have historically been considered communities of interest under the Voting Rights Act, helping to elect thousands of people of color to local, state and national posts. Advocates trying to increase the representation of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans hope to recreate that success.According to a poll by Gallup, 5.6 percent of Americans identify as L.G.B.T.Q. But fewer than 1,000 elected officials in the United States — less than 0.2 percent — are openly gay, according to the L.G.B.T.Q. Victory Institute. And some areas where L.G.B.T.Q. residents are a higher percentage of the population, like Washington, D.C., have no openly gay representatives.The Victory Fund plans to focus its lobbying on the five states where independent redistricting commissions, instead of elected officials, redraw political boundaries. But it said it would support any local organizations looking to further the effort.“The L.G.B.T.Q. community is one that’s often forgotten about,” said State Representative Brianna Titone of Colorado, a Democrat. She signed a letter asking Colorado’s independent redistricting commission to treat L.G.B.T.Q. residents as a community of interest, arguing that the “community continues to fight for basic civil rights while experiencing hate and discrimination.”“The commission knew that we care about this issue,” said Ms. Titone, who is the first transgender person to be elected to the Colorado legislature. “However, they need to be guided on where those communities exist so we can make sure that the maps reflect them.”The Victory Fund hopes to capitalize on grass-roots momentum in areas where locals are already pushing for L.G.B.T.Q. residents to be considered a community of interest. In the absence of federal data, it is also relying on local advocates to identify where those residents live and congregate through other data points, like the locations of L.G.B.T.Q. businesses or health centers.In the early 1990s in San Diego, advocates pulled together data from a variety of sources in order to push for a council district that would encompass all of Hillcrest, an L.G.B.T.Q. neighborhood. That district elected the city’s first openly gay official, and the seat has been consistently held by a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community ever since. Several have moved on to higher office, including the city’s current mayor, Todd Gloria.Activists cite that seat as evidence that a focus on redistricting is not only effective but can lead to a trickle-up effect in terms of political representation.According to the Gallup poll, nearly 16 percent of Americans aged 24 or younger who are eligible to vote identify as L.G.B.T.Q., much higher than the 5.6 percent among all age groups. Mr. Meloy said the growing population highlighted the need to treat L.G.B.T.Q. Americans as a community of interest.“We want to make sure this is standard practice the next time the census releases data,” Mr. Meloy said. “In order to even reach that 5.6 percent number — which is only going to increase — we need to elect 28,000 more people. So we’ve got a long way to go.” More

  • in

    Right seizes Trump playbook to blame migrants for environmental harm

    Joe Biden has sought to spur an expansion in renewable energy and electric vehicles since entering the White House but his climate agenda has also stirred something wholly unintended – a surge in blame foisted upon migrants for environmental degradation.An unusual lawsuit filed last month by Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s attorney general, is indicative of a growing nativist framing of the climate crisis, according to academics. In the lawsuit, Brnovich, a Republican, demands the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s immigration policies to help remedy the “pollution and stress on natural resources” caused by migrants who move to the US.“Migrants (like everyone else) need housing, infrastructure, hospitals, and schools,” the lawsuit reads. “They drive cars, purchase goods, and use public parks and other facilities. Their actions also directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which directly affects air quality.”Groups opposed to immigration and “overpopulation” have also found fresh impetus following the election of Biden. One group, called NumbersUSA, has complained that huge swaths of Arizona have been paved over due to immigration policies that amount to a “forced US population growth program”.Another organization, Negative Population Growth, recently launched a new campaign aimed at persuading the US president to undertake a “complete elimination of illegal and quasi-legal immigration and reduction of current legal immigration by 80%” in order to slash planet-heating emissions.Craig Lewis, executive vice-president of the group, urged members and supporters to bombard the White House with pleas to limit America’s population growth. “If the goal is to reduce emissions, it stands to reason that the number of emitters must be part of any calculations considered,” Lewis said.Concerns over population growth are not new, but the recent rhetoric indicates that the rightwing response to the climate crisis could be shifting from dismissal to antipathy aimed at the actions of other countries and their migrants as the impacts of global heating become undeniable, researchers have suggested.“This sort of language is coming back again and it’s not surprising,” said Betsy Hartmann, an academic at Hampshire College who specializes in the environment and migration. “The overt position of Trump to blame immigrants for crime and calling Mexicans rude names mobilized these tropes and now we have a liberal administration they being adapted to these times.”Hartmann said she was “very concerned this will be used by far-right groups to fuel hatred. It has become a sort of conventional wisdom now, which poses a real danger.”Warnings over unsustainable population growth stretch back decades, spanning proponents of Malthusianism and environmental groups that advocated for limited family sizes to reduce pressures upon the natural world. The issue is still occasionally aired by progressives and environmentalists – Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, said last year that many ecological issues “wouldn’t be a problem” with a smaller population.But more recently the theme has been seized upon by those on the right pushing for toughened borders. France’s far-right National Rally party has declared that “borders are the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet”, while, in Germany, the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany has warned the country’s environment faces “a great danger” if it allows in more migrants.In the US, the most prominent voices linking environmentalism with anti-immigration has been the web of groups dubbed the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, an ophthalmologist from Michigan who was once active in the Sierra Club and died in 2019. The Center for Immigration Studies, one of these groups, has welcomed Brnovich’s lawsuit.“Arizona is the first state to sue, but we can hope that it will not be the last,” said Julie Axelrod, director of litigation at the group and former adviser to the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s presidency. “The environmental consequences of immigration have never been more apparent.”The most extreme versions of this thinking, known as eco-fascism, has cropped up in the screeds issued by those accused of mass murder. Shortly before Patrick Crusius entered a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019 and shot dead 23 people and injured dozens of others, police say he uploaded a rambling manifesto to the 8chan website where he complained about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and how “the environment is getting worse by the year.”According to some scientists, blaming migrants for the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises racking Earth not only stokes resentment, it also obscures more important causes such as overconsumption by the planet’s richest – the world’s wealthiest 10% produce around a half of all consumption-based emissions, while the poorest half of humanity contributes only 10% – and the entrenched power of fossil fuel companies and their political allies.Environmental groups have now largely moved away from talking about overpopulation to focus on these other themes. “In the environmental community it has become a bit of a third rail issue. It’s very difficult to talk about,” said Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University.Jamieson added: “But if you’re trying to hang environmental concerns on to an anti-immigration agenda, that is so transparent, it’s just not sincere.“When it comes to problems like climate change, nationalism is the problem, not the solution. Ecological boundaries do not care about national boundaries so trying to solve climate change within one nation state is not an effective way of doing things.” More

  • in

    Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope

    Voters of color make up an increasing percentage of the United States electorate, but that trend isn’t hurting Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans.The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isn’t doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The expanding Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College underscores how the growing diversity of the nation may not aid Democrats enough to win in places they most need help. Just as often, population growth is concentrated in red states — like Texas and Florida — where the Democrats don’t win nonwhite voters by the overwhelming margins necessary to overcome the state’s Republican advantage.As for the Republicans, the widely held assumption that the party will struggle as white voters decline as a percentage of the electorate may be more myth than reality. Contrary to what Tucker Carlson says repeatedly on Fox News about the rise of “white replacement theory” as a Democratic electoral strategy, the country’s growing racial diversity has not drastically upended the party’s chances. Instead, Republicans face a challenge they often take for granted: white voters.One way to think about this is to compare today’s electorate with that of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were winning in landslides. Democrats, no doubt, have benefited from the increased racial diversity of the country since then: Mr. Biden would not have even come close to winning Georgia in November if its voters were as white they were back in the 1980s. Former President Donald J. Trump would have probably won re-election if he could have turned the demographic clock back to the ’80s and reduced the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. Today’s wave of Republican-backed laws restricting voting rights may be intended to do exactly that.In states like Georgia, where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even a return to the racial demographics of the 1980s wouldn’t do nearly as much to hurt Democrats as one might expect. Yes, the November result would have gone from an extremely close win for Mr. Biden to an extremely close win for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden would have won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though nonwhite voters had doubled their share of the electorate from 1984 to when Mrs. Clinton sought the presidency. Remarkably, Mr. Biden’s fairly modest gains among white voters helped him as much as the last 30 to 40 years of demographic shifts did.Similarly, Mr. Bush or Mr. Reagan would have still prevailed if they had had to win an electorate that was 29 percent nonwhite, as opposed to the merely 13 to 15 percent nonwhite electorates they sought to persuade at the time.This is not the conventional story of recent electoral history. In the usual tale, the growing racial diversity of the electorate broke the Reagan and Bush majorities and allowed the Democrats to win the national popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.And yet it is hard to find a single state where the increasing racial diversity of the electorate, even over an exceptionally long 30- or 40-year period, has been both necessary and sufficient for Democrats to flip a state from red to blue. Even in states where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, like Georgia and Arizona, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.One reason demographic change has failed to transform electoral politics is that the increased diversity of the electorate has come not mainly from Black voters but from Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters. Those groups back Democrats, but not always by overwhelmingly large margins.In 2020, Democrats probably won around 60 to 65 percent of voters across these demographic groups. These are substantial margins, but they are small enough that even decades of demographic shifts wind up costing the Republicans only a couple of percentage points.The new census data’s finding that the percentage of non-Hispanic white voters in the country’s electorate dropped by about two percentage points from 2016 to 2020 might seem like a lot. But with Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters representing the entirety of the increase, while the Black share of the electorate was flat, the growing nonwhite share of the electorate cost Mr. Trump only about half a percentage point over a four-year period.Another factor is the electoral map. The American electoral system rewards flipping states from red to blue, but many Democratic gains among nonwhite voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and often noncompetitive states. By contrast, many traditional swing states across the northern tier, like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, have had relatively little demographic change.The ability of Democrats to flip red states has been hampered by another pattern: the tendency for Republicans to fare relatively well among nonwhite voters in red states.It’s often said that Latino voters aren’t a monolith, and that’s certainly true. While Hispanic voters back Democrats by overwhelming margins in blue states like New York and Illinois, Republicans are often far more competitive among Latinos and members of other non-Black minority groups in red states — including those Democrats now hope to flip like Texas or Florida.Texas and Florida really would be blue if Latinos voted like their counterparts in New York or Illinois. But instead, Latino population growth has not quite had a strong pro-Democratic punch in the states where the party hoped to land a knockout blow.At the same time, white voters are easy to overlook as a source of Democratic gains, give that these voters still support Republicans by a comfortable margin. But Democrats probably improved from 39 to 43 percent among white voters from 1988 to 2020. It’s a significant shift, and perhaps even enough to cover the entirety of Mr. Bush’s margin of victory in the 1988 election, without any demographic change whatsoever.President Biden won seven states, including Wisconsin, while losing among their white voters.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIt’s a little easier to see the significance of Democratic gains among white voters at the state level. According to AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won white voters in states worth 211 electoral votes. Democrats like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004 probably didn’t win white voters in states worth much more than 60 electoral votes, based on exit poll and other survey data.Mr. Biden even won white voters in many of the states where the growing diversity of the electorate is thought to be the main source of new Democratic strength, including California and Colorado. And he also won white voters in many big, diverse states across the North where Republicans used to win and where nonwhite demographic change might otherwise be considered the decisive source of Democratic strength, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, which voted almost entirely Republican at the presidential level throughout the 1980s.According to the AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won seven states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — while losing among white voters. In these crucial states, Democratic strength among nonwhite voters was essential to Mr. Biden’s victory.But of these states, there are really only three where Mr. Biden clearly prevailed by the margin of the increased racial diversity of the electorate over the last few decades: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. He did not need to win any of these states to capture the presidency, but he would not have done so without long-term increases in both nonwhite voting power and Democratic strength among white voters.The story is quite different in the Northern battleground states. White voters still represent more than 80 percent of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the new census data. The nonwhite population in these states is predominantly Black; their share of the population has been fairly steady over the last few decades. But Mr. Biden won these states so narrowly that the relatively modest demographic shifts of the last few decades were necessary for him to prevail in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.It’s just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016. More

  • in

    The Fate of Biden’s Agenda Hangs in the Balance

    And it isn’t all about the filibuster.Every 10 years, after the collection of census data, states are required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to ensure that they remain equal in population.The process — as readers of this newspaper know — is vulnerable to gerrymandering, in which districts are redrawn to give favored parties, office holders or constituencies an advantage in elections.At the moment, Democrats control the House by a slim 219-211 majority, with five seats vacant. The loss of just five seats in 2022 would flip control to the Republican Party, which would then be empowered to block President Biden’s agenda.Both geographically and politically, the deck is stacked against Democrats, forcing the party and its leader to adjust election strategies every 10 years.This time around, states with Republican governors and Republican legislative majorities contain more than twice as many congressional districts as states under full Democratic control.Further compounding Democratic difficulties, Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, political scientists at the University of Michigan and Stanford, write in the 2013 paper “Unintentional Gerrymandering”:In many urbanized states, Democrats are highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural periphery.As a result, according to Chen and Rodden, “when districting plans are completed, Democrats tend to be inefficiently packed in homogeneous districts.”Despite winning the White House and the Senate, Democrats suffered a major setback in 2020 as their plans to wrest control of one or both branches of key state legislatures fell short. Democrats failed to take control of the statehouses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa and Texas, and of both branches in North Carolina — all states with large congressional delegations.Still, there is hope.First and foremost, Democrats have become competitive in many of the high-growth areas that benefit from redistricting; they have done so by pulling ahead of Republicans among voters with college degrees, who make up a disproportionate share of these prosperous communities.In addition, a total of 18 states have switched from partisan to independent redistricting. And finally, Republican attempts at voter suppression have proven at times to backfire, prompting higher turnout among minorities and increased Democratic Party mobilization.“One might be tempted to think that seat gains largely driven by economic prosperity favor Republicans while seat losses are found in impoverished and declining Democratic areas,” SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor and James G. Gimpel, political scientists at the University of Maryland, write in their Feb. 21 article “Reapportioning the U.S. Congress: The shifting geography of political influence.”In practice, Gaynor and Gimpel argue, Democrats have “adapted most impressively to compete and win in the newly emergent districts in Florida and the Far West,” narrowly eking out victories for control of Congress.As states await census data to guide redistricting, there is one wild card in the mix: the possible enactment of voting rights reform, HR 1 or the For the People Act of 2021 — the measure that passed the House on March 3 on a 220-210 vote, but faces the threat of a filibuster in the Senate.I asked Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard whose specialties include election law, about the bill. He emailed me to say thatThe voting legislation currently before Congress would revolutionize the redistricting process if it passed. It would require all states to use truly independent commissions, effective immediately. Separate from this structural reform, the bill would also include quantitative partisan bias thresholds that maps wouldn’t be allowed to exceed. These thresholds would have real teeth.At the same time, Stephanopoulos continued, the legislation would put the brakes on voter suppression laws:The bill affirmatively requires a series of participation-enhancing policies for congressional elections: automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, at least 15 days of early voting, expanded mail-in voting, restrictions on voter purges, restrictions on photo ID requirements, etc.David Lublin, a political scientist at American University, similarly described the transformative potential of HR1 in an email:The proposed legislation before Congress could have a huge effect in two ways. First, by putting in place a new trigger for the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 would become operative again and the Biden administration could use it to block discriminatory maps as well as an array of laws designed to suppress voting.Second, Lublin continued, by preventingmembers of either party from using district boundaries to entrench their advantage through redistricting. Even though Republicans would undoubtedly benefit from the geographic concentration of Democrats and racial redistricting, it would prevent egregious abuses.In the case of Republican voter suppression laws, Nicholas Valentino and Fabian G. Neuner, political scientists at Michigan and Arizona State Universities, found in their February 2016 paper “Why the Sky Didn’t Fall: Mobilizing Anger in Reaction to Voter ID Laws” thatSurprisingly, empirical evidence for significant demobilization, either in the aggregate or among Democrats specifically, has thus far failed to materialize. We suspect strong emotional reactions to the public debate about these laws may mobilize Democrats, counterbalancing the disenfranchising effect.In an email, Neuner cautioned that “our research is about short-term evocations of anger that may spur mobilization and it is not clear how long such anger can be sustained.”Black voters have proven exceptionally determined in the face of electoral adversity, including Supreme Court rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and voter suppression legislation.Kyle Raze, a graduate student in economics at the University of Oregon, studied turnout patterns in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. The court declared Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get preclearance from the Justice Department for any change in election law, unconstitutional. Shelby opened the door to the enactment of voter suppression measures.Raze, in his February 2021 paper, “Voting Rights and the Resilience of Black Turnout,” writes thatDespite well-founded fears to the contrary, the Shelby decision does not appear to have widened the turnout gap between Black and White voters in previously covered states.Instead, Raze foundan accumulating body of evidence that suggests that voters mobilize in response to increases in the cost of voting when those increases are perceived as threats to the franchise.While 2020 census data is not yet complete, it will determine the specific allocation of House seats to each state. Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, provided The Times with estimates of the number of House seats over which each party will exercise redistricting control. Levitt wrote in an email:It looks like Democrats will control 73 congressional seats this cycle, Republicans will control 188, and 167 will be under split partisan control, plus 7 in states with one district.These numbers represent a considerable improvement for Democrats compared with a decade ago, Levitt observes, when the party “controlled 44 seats, with Republicans controlling 213.”The Gaynor-Gimpel article I discussed earlier describes the shape of old and new districts in past decennial redistricting. In the two most recent reapportionments, based on the 2000 and 2010 census results, clear patterns emerge. More

  • in

    A New Delay for Census Numbers Could Scramble Congressional Elections

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA New Delay for Census Numbers Could Scramble Congressional ElectionsCensus data needed for legislative districts won’t be ready until September. Could that alter the balance of power in the House?If Illinois cannot approve district maps by Sept. 1, the State Constitution shifts mapmaking power from the Democratic-controlled Legislature to a bipartisan panel.Credit…Andrew Nelles for The New York TimesMichael Wines and Feb. 11, 2021Updated 9:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The delivery date for the 2020 census data used in redistricting, delayed first by the coronavirus pandemic and then by the Trump administration’s interference, now is so late that it threatens to scramble the 2022 elections, including races for Congress.The Census Bureau has concluded that it cannot release the population figures needed for drawing new districts for state legislatures and the House of Representatives until late September, bureau officials and others said in recent interviews. That is several months beyond the usual April 1 deadline, and almost two months beyond the July 30 deadline that the agency announced last month. The bureau did not respond to a request for comment but is expected to announce the delay on Friday.The holdup, which is already cause for consternation in some states, could influence the future of key districts. And with Democrats holding a slim 10-seat House majority, it even has the potential to change the balance of power in the House and some state legislatures, according to Michael Li, the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. States need the figures this year to redraw district lines for the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and for thousands of seats in state legislatures.The delay means there will be less time for the public hearings and outside comment required in many states, and less time once maps are drawn to contest new district lines in court, as often happens after redistricting.“The concern in some of those states is that the legislators will simply use a special session to secretly pass maps with zero public scrutiny, and then count on a tight timetable to eke out at least one election cycle” before a court could require new maps to be drawn, said Kathay Feng, the redistricting and representation director at Common Cause.The challenges extend beyond just drawing up districts. State and local election officials need time after new political maps are approved to redraw voting precincts and overhaul voter rolls to ensure that everyone is directed to the proper place to vote. And prospective candidates generally cannot file for office until they know whether they live within the new boundaries of the districts they are seeking to represent.“States are literally sitting on their hands, asking, ‘When will the data come?’” said Jeffrey M. Wice, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and a longtime expert on census and redistricting law.The Census Bureau’s delay stems mostly from problems the pandemic caused in last year’s counts of certain places, including college dorms and housing for agricultural workers. College students, for example, should be counted in dormitories and apartments near their schools, but the pandemic sent most students home last spring just as the census was starting. Now experts must find and locate them properly — and also ensure they are not double-counted as living with their parents.Such problems can be fixed, Census Bureau officials say, but doing so takes time. The location of millions of people is in play, and allotting or placing seats during reapportionment and redistricting can turn on the location of hundreds.It remains unclear how serious the political repercussions of the delay will be, but early indications are that Democrats have more reason to worry.By Mr. Li’s calculation in a report issued on Thursday, Republicans will most likely draw the maps for 181 House seats and Democrats for 49 seats, possibly rising to 74 if the New York Legislature (which is controlled by Democrats) chooses to override the state’s new independent redistricting commission.The map for the rest of the seats in the House will be drawn either in states where power is split between the parties or in states with nonpartisan redistricting commissions, which have mostly proliferated in blue states like California and Virginia and purple states like Michigan.That means Republicans, who have already shown an appetite for extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, could benefit disproportionately if too little time exists to contest maps drawn by legislatures for 2022 and the rest of the decade.The biggest targets for increasing one party’s share of Congress are the fast-growing Southern states of Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, where Republicans oversee the drawing of maps through control of both houses of the legislature.In Texas, Mr. Li expects Republicans to draw maps that would ensure Republican control of three new House seats that the state is expected to add because of population growth, and two existing seats now held by Democrats. The delay in receiving census data “could be used in some states to game the redistricting process, by leaving less time for legal challenge,” Mr. Li said.“It used to be, for example, that Texas finished redistricting in June, which gave affected parties six months to litigate,” he said. “Now a map might not be approved until November, which gives you less time to gather evidence and expert testimony.”Students outside a coronavirus testing site at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this month. The pandemic complicated census counts on campuses across the country.Credit…Lauren Justice for The New York TimesSuits that challenge redistricting often involve complicated fact-finding about whether a state has engaged in racial gerrymandering (either packing Black and Latino voters into a small number of districts to limit the scope of their political power, or spreading them thinly so they cannot easily elect a candidate).Democrats could try to squeeze out a few more seats in states they control through gerrymandering. But outside of New York, where the Democratic-controlled Legislature has the power to reject maps drawn by an independent commission, the party has slimmer pickings, Mr. Li said.Some Democrats are more sanguine. Population shifts in fast-growing states like Texas are concentrated in Democratic-leaning cities and suburbs, making it harder to draw districts that dilute the party’s power, said Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for the party’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee.In North Carolina and Pennsylvania — which both have elected Democratic governors — State Supreme Courts have ruled that the Republican gerrymanders of the last redistricting cycle violate State Constitutions, raising a barrier to future distorted maps.And in other big states that Republicans controlled and gerrymandered a decade ago — Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio among them — either Democratic governors or nonpartisan redistricting commissions place limits on overly skewed legislative maps.For other reasons, the delay in census totals has the potential to upend map drawing in Illinois and Ohio.Democrats control 13 of the 18 House seats in Illinois, in part because of gerrymandering. (The state’s total number could drop to 17 after the House is reapportioned this year.) But if final maps cannot be approved by Sept. 1, the Illinois Constitution shifts mapmaking power from the Democratic-controlled Legislature to a panel of four Democrats, four Republicans and one person randomly chosen from the two parties. Giving Republicans a say in map drawing would probably increase the share of seats they are likely to win.The same could be true in the State Senate, where Democrats now control 70 percent of the chamber’s seats, and in the State House, where they hold 60 percent of them. The Legislature is aware of the Constitution’s redistricting provision, and Democrats could try to address the issue, although how is unclear.“Illinois is an example of where the Legislature is talking about using old data to produce maps that are largely the same as they currently have — and letting people sue,” Ms. Feng, of Common Cause, said.The reverse applies in Ohio, where a 2018 referendum amended the State Constitution to hand congressional and state legislative map duties to a bipartisan commission. The same amendment returns redistricting duties to the Republican-dominated Legislature if the commission fails to approve political maps by Oct. 31, barely a month after the Census Bureau’s current estimate for finishing population calculations. Some experts said legal challenges to redistricting based on the Census Bureau’s delay seemed likely, from voters or candidates who would want to extend the period for drawing maps.“If the necessary data aren’t available at the time the law says the state redistricting must be done, then a court could relax the deadline,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the Stanford-M.I.T. Healthy Elections Project. In some states, courts granted similar pandemic-related extensions for deadlines related to balloting procedures in the November election, like voting by mail.The rationale is that “given extraordinary circumstances, we’re doing something different this time,” Mr. Persily said.The delay in receiving the census data could also cause the completion of map drawing to bump up against candidates’ filing deadlines in states like Virginia and New Jersey, which will hold elections for the State Legislature in November, as well as states with early 2022 filing deadlines for later primary elections.In Virginia, officials said, the delay raises the prospect of holding state legislative elections three years in a row — using old maps in 2022 if the new ones are not finished, using new maps in 2023 and conducting scheduled legislative elections in 2024.“Whenever this crazy process ends, election administrators have to deal with all these lines,” said Kimball W. Brace, a Washington-based redistricting consultant who usually works with Democratic politicians. “Precincts, voter registration systems — all of that is now in a shorter timetable.”Come Election Day, he said, “Either you’re ready, or you’re not.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    The Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage With new census results coming, Republicans control redistricting in key states, while Democrats prepare for legal challenges and look to redraw some maps of their own. Demonstrators at a rally protesting gerrymandering outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in 2019.Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersReid J. Epstein and Jan. 31, 2021Updated 6:37 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — With the election over and Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, officials in both parties are bracing for a bruising new battle with a different balance of power: the redrawing of congressional maps, where Republicans hold the advantage in many state legislatures across the country, including in key battleground states.Republicans hold total control of redistricting in 18 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which are growing in population and expected to gain seats after the 2020 census is tabulated. Some election experts believe the G.O.P. could retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly drawn districts.Already, Republicans are discussing redrawing two suburban Atlanta districts held by Democrats to make one of them more Republican; slicing Democratic sections out of a Houston district that Republicans lost in 2018; and carving up a northeastern Ohio district held by Democrats since 1985.“I would say that the national vote could be the same as this year two years from now, and redistricting by itself would easily be enough to alter who controls the chamber,” said Samuel S. Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. He estimated that reapportionment alone could net the Republicans three seats, and gerrymandering in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida another five seats.With Democrats holding a 222-211 edge, Republicans would probably need to flip just six seats to win back the majority. But Dr. Wang and other good-government experts cautioned that other factors could determine the majority.Democrats will try to redraw districts in their favor in states like New York, Illinois and Maryland, they said. Some battleground states have adopted nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions. And President Biden did not create a wave of downballot victories for Democrats in the November elections, so there are fewer surprise winners who could easily lose their seats in 2022.While partisan warfare on Capitol Hill draws most of the national attention, the battles over redistricting are among the fiercest and most consequential in American government. Reapportionment and redistricting occurs every 10 years after the census, with states with the fastest-growing populations gaining seats in Congress at the expense of those with slower-growing or shrinking populations. The balance of power established by gerrymandering can give either party an edge that lasts through several election cycles; court challenges — even if successful — can take years to unwind those advantages.Outside of the State Capitol in Austin. Texas is expected to pick up House seats after the 2020 census results are tabulated.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThis year, Texas (with potentially three new seats) and Florida (two) are expected to be the biggest winners, while Illinois, New York and, for the first time, California will each lose seats once the Census Bureau makes the reapportionment figures official. That could give Republicans an inherent advantage in the midterm elections in November 2022 — regardless of Mr. Biden’s popularity then.The bureau is not expected to deliver its data until late July, several months behind schedule, giving state lawmakers and redistricting commissions far less time than usual to draw the maps and deal with inevitable court challenges before the 2022 primaries begin.Democrats have been fighting on slanted terrain with redistricting ever since Republicans ran the table during the 2010 midterm elections and drew themselves favorable gerrymandered maps in 2011 and 2012. Though courts invalidated them in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, many still remain.Even though Democrats won control of the House in 2018, “the lingering effects of partisan gerrymandering, disproportionately by Republican controlled legislatures, make it harder for the Democrats to hold onto control or win control,” said Bernard Grofman, a professor of politics at the University of California, Irvine, “because they have to win probably closer to 52 percent of the national vote, or definitely more than 51 percent.”A host of states have adopted independent commissions to draw maps, arguing that people without a vested interest would be more likely to draw fairer maps. Some good-government groups and political scientists have lobbied for more changes, such as the use of algorithms to determine district boundaries, though there is broad debate about what would be effective in erasing the partisan tilt of the process.Adam Kincaid, director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, is preparing for legal challenges to redistricting.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesRepublicans have, for the most part, adopted an elections-have-consequences attitude toward the mapping process. Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said his energy will be directed toward the inevitable legal battles that will follow this year’s partisan map-drawing.“If it wasn’t for lawsuits that were brought in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Florida, Republicans would be in the majority today,” Mr. Kincaid said. The things to focus on, he said, were “defending maps drawn by Republican legislatures and also being more aggressive about going after Democrat gerrymanders in the blue states.”As they look to reframe the electoral maps, Republicans are debating how aggressive they should be. They can push the boundaries and try to win the most seats possible in 2022, which puts them at risk of losing more seats in future years in the growing suburbs that are attracting waves of Democrats. Or they can aim for a smaller number of Republican districts that can create a more durable majority, with the potential to last the decade.The central redistricting battlegrounds will be in Texas and Florida. Though both states are controlled by Republicans, the population growth has come largely from people of color and suburbanites — demographics that have trended toward Democrats during the Trump era.“Their ability to manipulate the map to the tune of 30 seats like they did last time is no longer on the table,” said Kelly Ward Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “If the map plays out fairly, we will end up with more competitive seats than we have now.’’Kelly Ward Burton, the executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, at her Santa Barbara home.Credit…Damon Casarez for The New York TimesStill, the combination of sophisticated mapmaking software and the abbreviated map-drawing period will give Republican lawmakers a far freer hand to put into effect favorable districts in the next year. And Republicans in states like Texas and Georgia will benefit from the Supreme Court decision in 2013 on the Voting Rights Act, which lifted the requirement that they get federal approval for redistricting.“I’m very concerned,” said Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor who this month became the new chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. He is spending his first weeks as chairman devising a plan to challenge and offset Republican efforts.A decade ago, Mr. Diaz led the Fair Districts Now effort, which proposed a constitutional amendment offering guidelines for redistricting in Florida. Voters approved the measure in 2010, in time for the 2011 redistricting. But Republicans in the legislature ignored many of the principles, installing a highly gerrymandered map that helped Republicans win 17 of the 27 House seats in 2012 while President Barack Obama won re-election.Although there were near immediate legal challenges, it was not until 2015 that the State Supreme Court struck down the redrawn map, saying eight districts had been aggressively gerrymandered to favor Republicans.In Texas, a similar concern is rippling through the electorate. On Thursday, the State Senate’s redistricting committee held a virtual hearing, welcoming public commentary. For over two hours, pleas came in from across the state: please draw fair maps.“I believe that gerrymandering is an existential threat to the nation,” said Rick Kennedy, who lives in Austin and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020.Though the data for reapportionment is still outstanding, Phil King, the Republican who leads the redistricting committee in the Texas State House, said almost all of the population growth had come from the triangle between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. He noted that the committee was probably going to have to extend some rural districts into urban areas to keep the population at roughly 850,000 per district.“If you’re in West Texas where most of the counties are 10 to 20,000 people, you’ve got to reach into those urban areas to pick up some population,” Mr. King said.Yet those slivers into urban areas are what Democrats and good-government groups denounce as a contorted form of gerrymandering, weakening one area’s political voice by spreading it among other districts — and one that disproportionately affects people of color.“We’ll continue to see racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering in terms of packing in the urban areas,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, referring to a gerrymandering tactic of creating a heavily partisan district by “packing” it with supporters. Ms. Riggs argued gerrymandering lawsuits against the 2010 Republican-drawn maps in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.Members listening as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, delivers an address in the House Chambers on the opening day of the 117th Congress in the Capitol Building.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDemocrats will draw lines for far fewer congressional seats. The biggest Democratic state, California, outsources redistricting to a commission, as do Colorado, Virginia and Washington. And Mr. Kincaid said Republicans were preparing to challenge Democratic maps in states like Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico.In New York, where Democrats control redistricting for the first time since 1991, half of the Republican congressional delegation — either seven or eight members, depending on the outcome of one undecided race — could see their districts disappear if Democrats pursue the most aggressive gerrymandering available.“It’s reasonable to expect that when the voters of New York have given Democrats a supermajority control of both houses of the legislature, that might create an opportunity that didn’t exist in the past,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Some election experts argued that Republicans were so successful at drawing gerrymandered maps 10 years ago that it would be difficult for them to add to their advantage now.“The Democrats were able to win the House in 2018 despite the fact that there were some very gerrymandered states,” said Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who studies gerrymandering.Democrats are also in stronger position nationally then they were in 2011. Key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have divided government with Democratic governors who could veto maps, setting up likely court battles. In Virginia, Democrats won control of the state government in 2019 and in 2020 voters approved a nonpartisan redistricting commission, eliminating the ability of either party to dominate the redrawing of districts.Other battleground states like Michigan and Arizona have established independent commissions, rather than partisan legislatures, that will draw the new maps.Ben Diamond, a Florida state representative who leads the Democratic redistricting efforts there, is calling on his colleagues in the legislature to commit “to transparency and public engagement” and “a meaningful scheduled way of doing this.”He added: “The sooner we can lay out how this work is going to be done, from a public engagement and a transparency perspective, the better,”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    We Need a Second Great Migration

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Need a Second Great MigrationGeorgia illuminates the path to Black power. It lies in the South. Follow me there.Opinion ColumnistJan. 8, 2021A young supporter at a rally for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Atlanta in December.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesATLANTA — A year ago this week, I packed some bags and left New York City for Atlanta.I’d lived in New York for 26 years. The city made me feel awake and alive — buildings tickling the sky, trains snaking underfoot. There was a seductive muscularity to the city, a feeling of riding the razor between your destiny and your demise.I had become a New Yorker, a Brooklyn boy. There I had raised my children. There I planned to live out my days.But the exquisite fierceness of the city, its blur of ambition and ingenuity, didn’t hide the fact that many of my fellow Black New Yorkers were locked in perpetual oppression — geographically, economically and politically isolated. All around the North, Black power, if it existed, was mostly municipal, or confined to regional representation. Black people were not serving as the dominant force in electing governors or senators or securing Electoral College votes.Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, calls migrants of the Great Migration “refugees and exiles of terror.” By extension, many Black communities in Northern cities, abandoned by the Black elite and spurned by white progressives, have become, functionally, permanent refugee camps.I had an idea to change that. An idea about Black self-determination. Simply put, my proposition was this: that Black people reverse the Great Migration — the mass migration of millions of African-Americans largely from the rural South to cities primarily in the North and West that spanned from 1916 to 1970. That they return to the states where they had been at or near the majority after the Civil War, and to the states where Black people currently constitute large percentages of the population. In effect, Black people could colonize the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them.In the first census after the Civil War, three Southern states — South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana — were majority Black. In Florida, Blacks were less than two percentage points away from constituting a majority; in Alabama, it was less than three points; in Georgia, just under four.Credit…Library of CongressBut the Great Migration hit the South like a bomb, siphoning off many of the youngest, brightest and most ambitious. In South Carolina, the Black share of the population declined from 55 percent to about 30 percent. Over six decades, six million people left the South.Reversing that tide would create dense Black communities, and that density would translate into statewide political power.Generally speaking, mass movements are largely for the young and unencumbered. Moving is expensive and psychologically taxing, displacing one from home, community and comforts. But I believe those obstacles are outweighed by opportunity. All who are able should consider this journey. That, it became clear, included me.I chose Atlanta because many of my friends were already there, having moved to the “hot” Southern city after college, and because I saw Georgia as on the cusp of transformational change. Little did I know that this election cycle would be a proof of concept for my proposal.In November, Georgia voted blue for the first time since Bill Clinton won the state in 1992. A majority of those who voted for Joe Biden were Black. This week, Georgia elected its first Black senator in state history — indeed the first popularly elected Black senator from the whole South: Raphael Warnock, a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Georgia also elected its first Jewish senator — only the second from the South since the 1880s: Jon Ossoff.The Rev. Raphael Warnock on Tuesday.Credit…Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesPerhaps most striking, the Warnock win was the first time in American history that a Black senator was popularly elected by a majority-Black coalition. It was a momentous flex of Black power.It was jarring to see that news almost immediately overshadowed by the vision of white rioters marauding through the Capitol on Wednesday. It was an affront, an attack. We must remember that while modern wails of white power may be expressed by a man in face paint and furs shouting from a purloined podium, Black power must materialize the way it did in Georgia.The success of the Democratic Party’s gains there were in part due to a massive voter enfranchisement effort led by Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor, whose group Fair Fight helped register 800,000 new voters in the state in just two years. But it was also attributable to a rise in the state’s Black population.In the early 1990s, Black people constituted a little over a quarter of the population; now they constitute about a third of it. The Atlanta metro area saw an increase of 251,000 Black people between 2010 and 2016. In 2018, The Atlantic magazine described this area as the “epicenter of what demographers are calling the ‘reverse Great Migration’” of Black people to the South.Credit…Sheila Pree BrightBiden carried the state by only around 12,000 votes. With this election, Georgia became the model for how Black people can experience true power in this country and alter the political landscape.I realize that I am proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country. This may seem an odd turn for me. I am not an activist. I am a newspaperman. I interpret. I bear witness.The moment that I realized that I could be more than an observer came in 2013. I was at the Ford Foundation for a series of lectures on civil rights when Harry Belafonte addressed the room. He spoke in a low-but-sure raspy voice, diminished by age, but deepened in solemnity. He was erudite and searing, and I was mesmerized. He posed a question: “Where are the radical thinkers?”That question kept replaying in my head, and it occurred to me that I had been thinking too small, all my life, about my approach to being in the world. I realized that a big idea could change the course of history.This proposition is my big idea.Many of the issues that have driven racial justice activists to organize and resist over the last few years — criminal justice, mass incarceration, voting rights and education and health policies — are controlled at the state level. The vast majority of people incarcerated in America, for example, are in state prisons: 1.3 million. Only about a sixth as many are in federal prisons. States have natural resources and indigenous industries. Someone has to control who is granted the right to exploit, and profit from, those resources. Why not Black people?Of course questions — and doubts — abound about such a proposal. Questions like: Isn’t the proposal racist on its face?No. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.I am unapologetically pro-Black, not because I believe in Black supremacy, which is as false and reckless a notion as white supremacy, but rather because I insist upon Black equity and equality. In a society and system in which white supremacy is ubiquitous and inveterate, Black people need fierce advocates to help restore the balance — or more precisely, to establish that balance in the first place.My call for Black power through Black majorities isn’t intended to exclude white people. Black majority doesn’t mean Black only. Even in the three states that once held Black majorities after the Civil War — South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana — those majorities were far from overwhelming, peaking at 61 percent, 59 percent and 52 percent.Nor does a majority-Black population mean a Blacks-only power structure. There are cities in the Northeast and Midwest, like Detroit, Philadelphia and Saint Louis, that have a Black majority or plurality and yet have white mayors. The point is not to create racial devotion, but rather race-conscious accountability.Others have objected: Isn’t the North just better for Black people than the South?Many Black people are leery of the South, if not afraid of it. They still have in their minds a retrograde South: dirty and dusty, overgrown and underdeveloped, a third-world region in a first-world country. They see a region that is unenlightened and repressive, overrun by religious zealots and open racists. The caricatures have calcified: hillbillies and banjos, Confederate flags and the Ku Klux Klan.To be sure, all of that is here. But racism is more evenly distributed across the country than we are willing to admit.It is true that in surveys, people in the North express support for fewer racially biased ideas than those in the South, but such surveys reveal only which biases people confess to, not the ones they subconsciously possess. So I asked the researchers at Project Implicit to run an analysis of their massive data set to see if there were regional differences in pro-white or anti-Black prejudice. The result, which one of the researchers described as “slightly surprising,” was that there was almost no difference in the level of bias between white people in the South and those in the Northeast or Midwest. (The bias of white people in the West was slightly lower.)White people outside the South are more likely to say the right words, but many possess the same bigotry. Racism is everywhere. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t you rather have some real political power to address that racism? And a yard!For decades Northern liberals have maintained the illusion of their moral superiority to justify their lack of progress in terms of racial equality. The North’s arrogant insistence that it had no race problem, or at least a minimal one, allowed a racialized police militarism to take root. It allowed housing and education segregation to flourish in supposedly “diverse” cities. It allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as white flight and urban disinvestment.Credit…Joshua Lott for The New York TimesThe supposed egalitarianism of Northern cities is a flimsy disguise for a white supremacy that diverges from its Southern counterpart only in style, not substance.And, while the North has been stuck in its self-righteous stasis, the savagery of the South has in some ways softened, or morphed. I am careful not to position this progress as fully redemptive or restorative. White supremacy clearly still exists here, corrupting everything from criminal justice to electoral access. The “New South” — with its thriving Black middle class and increasing political power — is still more aspiration than reality.But the wishful idealizing of a New South is no more naïve than a willful blindness to the transgressions of the Now North. As the author Jesmyn Ward wrote in 2018 in Time about her decision to leave Stanford and move back to Mississippi, American racism is an “infinite room”: “It is the bedrock beneath the soil. Racial violence and subjugation happen on the streets of St. Louis, on the sidewalks of New York City and in the BART stations of Oakland.”Protesting against police brutality in New York in June.Credit…Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesBlack people have traversed this country in search of a place where the hand of oppression was lightest and the spirit of prosperity was greatest, but have had to learn a bitter lesson: Racism is everywhere.Finally: Won’t this idea encounter powerful opposition, even from liberals?Well, when has revolution ever been easy? When has a ruling class humbly handed over power or an insurgent class comfortably acquired it? Revolution, even a peaceful one, is frightening, and dangerous, because those with power will view any attempt at divestiture as an act of war.The opposition will most likely manifest in many ways. There will no doubt be opposition from the Black Establishment in the North, and those in the political class whose offices will be in jeopardy if the Black populations in their cities shrink.This is a very real concern. There may be some fluctuation in Black political representation during the course of a reverse migration, and, in the beginning, positions added in the South may not balance out those lost in the North. This is a function of how political machines operate, the way regions are gerrymandered, the way parties horse-trade, the way the establishment grooms ascendant stars, and the way voter suppression is inflicted. But, in the end, the benefit and abundance of Black political power would be to the good.Even some white liberals, those who call themselves allies, may shrink from the notion of Black power, drawing a false equivalence to the concept of racial superiority espoused by the white power movement. They recoil from the very mention of Black power even as they live out their lives in a world designed by and for white power, not only the hooded and hailing, but also the robed and badged.Others may simply mourn the notion of a path to Black equality that doesn’t feature a starring role for white liberal guilt, one that doesn’t center on their capacity for growth and evolution, but skips over them altogether.Still others may simply hesitate because it sounds like I’m throwing in the towel on the grand experiment of multiculturalism. I sought for months to put this proposal to Bill Clinton, someone I thought had deftly navigated the racial minefields in the South. I got my chance in the wee hours of a summer night on Martha’s Vineyard in 2019. He responded with curiosity but not endorsement. The lack of approval was not deflating, because it had not been requested. Black people need no permission to seek their own liberation.The idea received a more enthusiastic reception from the Rev. William Barber, the father of the Moral Monday civil rights protests, who in 2018 reactivated the Poor People’s Campaign, the multiracial project Martin Luther King was organizing when he was assassinated. Barber, a staunch believer in what he calls “fusion coalition” and cross-racial alliance, pointed out that most of the people who marched with him in the Moral Monday protests were white. And yet he was open to the concept of reverse migration.Atlantans gathered outside the Georgia State Capitol building in June.Credit…Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press“From state up is the only way,” he told me. “If you change the South, you change the entire nation.” This is not surprising coming from Barber, whose own parents were reverse migrants who moved back South to fight racism.All these objections are to say nothing of the backlash to come from conservatives, of course. One lesson that history teaches is that the system reacts forcefully, often violently, when whiteness faces the threat of a diminution of its power. And that’s exactly what we saw in this week’s storming of the Capitol by supporters of the white power president Donald J. Trump, in concert with his efforts to overturn the election.For 150 years, Black Americans have been hoping and waiting. We have marched and resisted. Many of our most prominent leaders have appeased and kowtowed. We have seen our hard-earned gains eroded by an evolving white supremacy, while at the same time we have been told that true and full equality was imminent. But, there is no more guarantee of that today than there was a century ago.I say to Black people: Return to the South, cast down your anchor and create an environment in which racial oppression has no place.As Frederick Douglass once wrote about escaping slavery, “I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”Black people must once again pray with their legs.This is an adaptation from the forthcoming, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More