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    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

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    How to Ensure This Never Happens Again

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow to Ensure This Never Happens AgainThe election and its aftermath have revealed weaknesses in our democracy. Here’s how we can fix some of them. Beverly Gage and Ms. Gage is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.Jan. 8, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by The New York Times; from left: Eli Durst for The New York Times, Angela Weiss, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Drew Angerer, via Getty Images and Pool photos by J. Scott Applewhite.The path from the Nov. 3 election has been harrowing for American democracy. Though state and local officials ran clean, well-functioning elections, leaving no doubt that Joe Biden was the victor, President Trump and a sizable faction of Republicans in Congress have relentlessly tried to subvert the results. Their assault culminated in yesterday’s insurrection at the Capitol, a physical attack on the home of our democracy, incited by the sitting president.This dark reality owes much to Trump’s malign political style — his narcissism and demagogy, his willingness to sell lies to his political base — and to the ways that the Republican Party has fed his worst tendencies. But certain aspects of the electoral system also helped bring us to this point. With even the soon-to-be Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, now conceding that elections are not supposed to look like this, the months ahead may present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix what’s wrong with American democracy — or risk losing it altogether.Generally speaking, politicians don’t like to run on a platform of small “d” democratic reforms. Structural change can seem abstract and the obstacles to success too great. But history shows that it can — and must — be done. In other fraught moments, under pressure from an outraged American public, politicians have managed to transcend party and regional divisions to strengthen the democratic process.During the Progressive Era, Congress and the states approved two constitutional amendments that changed the nature of national elections. The first, ratified in 1913, allowed Americans to vote directly for their senators rather than leaving the choice to their state legislatures. The second was the 1920 women’s suffrage amendment, which roughly doubled the size of the electorate.By the 1960s, the civil rights movement finally forced Congress, with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to end the exclusion of most Black people from voting. A few years later, both parties reformed their primary systems to give their voters a real say in choosing their party’s presidential candidate. And in 1971, it took the states less than four months to ratify a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 in response to widespread protests over the Vietnam draft, which called up men starting at age 18.Since then, bipartisan majorities in Congress have passed more technocratic but still useful reforms. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (also known as the motor voter law) required states to offer voter registration materials to people who get or renew a driver’s license or apply for public assistance. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 addressed meltdowns in the 2000 election — when an estimated four to six million ballots were not counted — by providing federal funds to replace faulty punch-card and lever-based balloting.Now we are once more in dire need of reform. But some proposals will be far easier to enact than others, and each will require a different strategy. Here are some ideas for fixing what ails, from the most feasible in the short run to the biggest reach.Fix the Electoral College ProcessThe 1887 Electoral Count Act, which is supposed to govern the resolution of a disputed presidential election, is “impenetrable or, at the very least, indeterminate,” according to Edward B. Foley, a scholar who has spent his career studying it. If we’re stuck with the Electoral College, we should at least make the rules for how it operates in the event of a dispute crystal clear.Congress could detail narrow circumstances in which a state election would be deemed to have failed (in the event of a natural disaster on Election Day, for example). A new law could also clarify that state legislatures have the power to choose electors only in those circumstances or not at all (the Constitution leaves the door open to more meddling). And it could outline what happens if a state submits dueling slates of electors, along with the current rules for choosing a president in the House if all else fails.Establish national best practices for voting and election securityAmerican elections don’t follow a set of best practices to enhance both access and security. Better election laws could provide for equitable access to polling places, early voting, and vote by mail, while protecting eligible voters from being purged from the rolls and ensuring that no one could vote twice. States could also build infrastructure that’s safe from hackers.Legislation in the House provides one possible blueprint. A bill it passed in 2019 would set national standards and fund election infrastructure. It also would grant the right to vote to people who have been convicted of a felony if they’ve been sentenced only to probation or released from custody (several states have since introduced their own such laws). And it sets up a pilot program to give high school students information about registering to vote before they graduate.Register voters automaticallyAutomatically registering voters — through drivers licenses, for instance — would add up to 50 million people to the rolls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. When the House passed national automatic voter registration in 2019, no Republicans voted for it. If national legislation proves unlikely, states can enact automatic voter registration on their own. Twenty states and the District of Columbia have some version, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into statesThe Senate’s structure, with each state, regardless of population, having two senators, favors rural, white, Republican-leaning states, creating a body that fails to reflect the national electorate. Diverse, blue-leaning California, with almost 40 million residents, has just two senators, while the states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska — all red-leaning and mostly white — have a combined 10 senators for fewer than five million residents overall. Statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico would not only provide representation in the national government to millions of Americans who now lack it, but would begin to address (though not eliminate) the imbalance in the Senate by adding four new Senate seats representing racially diverse, densely populated urban areas.The Democratic House passed a statehood bill for D.C. for the first time last year. Statehood itself would require both approval by Congress and by the state’s residents.End gerrymanderingPartisan gerrymandering reduces the number of competitive electoral districts, contributing to the polarization of Congress and state legislatures by pushing candidates away from the center and all but guaranteeing one party’s success in most races.In 2019, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are beyond the reach of federal courts. But state courts can limit gerrymandering based on state constitutions, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did in 2018. States can also adopt nonpartisan redistricting commissions, as several have done. Research shows that these commissions have succeeded in drawing electoral maps that neutralize partisan bias.Make People VoteCompulsory voting is, hands down, the most effective way to increase turnout. It also changes politics: Suppressing the vote is no longer a strategy. “Campaigns have to focus on persuasion, not demobilizing voters,” says Nathaniel Persily, co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.A city or a county could pass an ordinance imposing a penalty on people who fail to vote. The idea wouldn’t be to force voters to pick a candidate. They could turn in a blank ballot. But they couldn’t ignore the election without some penalty. (A potentially more popular alternative — giving people a tax credit or another benefit in exchange for voting — would probably require a change in federal law.)Shorten the TransitionIn the early 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress and the states came together on a constitutional amendment to shorten the presidential transition from four to two-and-a-half months. That change came too late to prevent a disastrous and lengthy transition between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which accelerated the country’s banking crisis and deepened the depression. Now, the period from Nov 3 to Jan 20 itself seems too long, given the fast-paced nature of political events. Rather than a time of peaceful transition, it has this year became an opportunity for mischief that can rattle democracy to its core. A new constitutional amendment could update the transition timeline, with no partisan implications.Eliminate the Electoral CollegeThe Electoral College, which apportions its electors based on the size of each state’s congressional delegation, skews elections by concentrating attention on a handful of swing states. One result is that a candidate can lose in the Electoral College while winning the popular vote. Ask Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.Eliminating the Electoral College altogether would require a constitutional amendment. As a more viable alternative, reformers have proposed a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States would pledge to award all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The compact would take effect once states with the winning minimum total of 270 votes join. So far, states with 196 electoral votes combined have signed on.Beverly Gage is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More