After the Commerce Department decided to ask if people filling out the census are citizens, the crazed racial Left mobilized and called the change the return of Jim Crow. The change to the Census was a plot against minorities.
To them, Jim Crow keeps returning again and again. His return has more sequels than Rocky.
Jim Crow first came back as Voter ID. Jim Crow returned as keeping voter rolls clean. Then Jim Crow rode into town, again, when Kansas sought to ensure that only citizens are registering to vote.
Jim Crow also appeared when the federal Election Assistance Commission allowed Alabama and Georgia to change a federal voter registration form to ensure that only citizens were registering to vote. Jim Crow is also on the loose in Indiana, because that state compares Indiana voter rolls with other states via the interstate cross check program, to make sure people aren’t registered twice.
Jim Crow is on the loose everywhere, it seems. Anytime honest elections are promoted, Jim Crow appears.
I try not to give the crazed Left public relations advice, but it seems that crying wolf over and over isn’t the best strategy.
When it comes to the outrage about the Trump administration asking for citizenship information in the 2020 Census, the Jim Crow strategy is especially absurd.
Why? Because not having citizenship data on the Census most dramatically harms African-Americans.
Let’s borrow the absurd rhetoric of the crazed Left for a moment: the status quo — not asking for citizenship data in the Census — is Jim Crow. Jim Crow hurts black political power, and so does a lack of solid citizenship data in the decennial census.
Here’s how.
In many urban areas, blacks compete with Hispanics for local office, particularly in Democratic Party primaries. Miami, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago are places where local Democratic Party politics have deep African-American and Hispanic constituencies. In November, they are rock-solid Democrat voters to defeat Republicans. But in primaries, they often compete.
More importantly, the two groups also compete in line-drawing exercises, where districts are created for school board, county council, statehouse, and Congress. Racial line-drawing — an exercise compelled by the Voting Rights Act whether you like it or not — is reality. Racial line-drawing relies on census data, and each district must have essentially equal population under existing law.
This line drawing counts non-citizen Hispanics to generate Hispanic-majority districts with the minimum total population (citizen and non-citizen combined). But blacks have to ride in the back of the redistricting bus, because they are almost all citizens.
That’s where Trump’s Census change could revolutionize the dynamics of line-drawing in urban communities where blacks and Hispanics have concentrated populations.
Blacks have been losing political power in immigrant-heavy urban cores because non-citizens are not identified by the Census and are counted for redistricting.
And that’s what the critics of Trump’s census change are really terrified of.
Los Angeles provides a particularly stark example. For over a decade, African-American leaders in Los Angeles have been complaining to the Justice Department that blacks have fewer city council seats than they should. Instead, the seats are going to Hispanics because the districts are being drawn to benefit Hispanics instead of blacks.
But how could this happen, you ask? The lines are being drawn that way because the Census does not seek accurate citizenship data in the decennial census, and Los Angeles doesn’t use citizenship population to draw districts of equal citizen population.
Blacks in Los Angeles County are nearly all American citizens. The same is not true for the Los Angeles Hispanic population. Yet the exercise in line-drawing of county council seats treats non-citizens and citizens exactly alike.
Hey Jessie Jackson put this in your hooka and smoke it