One of the, um, underrated aspects of The Trumppening is the hilariously on the nose examples of textbook racism that come burgling out of Trump’s fetid gravity well from time to time. I don’t mean the sorts of alleged internalized or structural racisms that get trotted out on NPR by social scientists based on a dubious study of 45 psych-major undergrads, or the appropriative racism of the wrong people making tacos, or whatever, but the sort of undeniable racism that is so bold that one’s first instinct (if one is white, anyway) is to laugh and assume there must be some sort of mistake. Surely, no one is actually that audaciously racist!
Trump himself, of course, has been a fount of standard issue racist cockbaggery for years—his whole thing with the Central Park 5, the suit brought by the Department of Justice in 1973 for refusing to rent to black people (and the evidence was strong), take or leave much of the et cetera. Since entering the popular modern political consciousness with his birtherism crusade to delegitimize Barack Obama by capitalizing on much of the public’s instinctive othering of the brown-skinned guy with the funny name, though, Trump has been reading the subtext out loud—well, even louder than before, then.
When Trump said that an American-born federal judge was incapable of doing his job because of his Mexican parents, it sounded like he was reading from the script of a video about RACISM and BIGOTRY that gets played in middle schools. But even that—and the Mexicans-are-rapists stuff, and the shithole countries stuff, and the Pocahontas stuff, and the Charlottesville stuff—is an example of his personal awfulness, rather than something revelatory of deep institutional racism. (Except that we, ahh, elected him president, I guess.) It was occasionally laugh-inducing in its bald-facedness, but it mostly suggested a personal bias, and the personal biases of awful men, even disastrously powerful ones, only carry so much weight. I’m not dismissing it, I’m just saying that he, too, shall pass.
Other things, like manipulated census counts and gerrymandered voting districts and the pre-determined power structures that arise from them, are more durable.
Yesterday, the New York Times published a story that should be cited for years to come, alongside American slavery and Jim Crow and redlining, as a clear cut example of what institutional racism looks like. Here is a presidential administration that is arguing before the Supreme Court to add a question to the census that was designed specifically to further entrench the political power of Republicans and—explicitly!—non-hispanic whites. When I first saw the headlines, I laughed and thought there must be some sort of mistake—surely this was being blown out of proportion, at least a bit. Then I read the story. The whole thing is fascinating, including the weird circumstances surrounding the unearthing of the source materials, but here’s a relevant excerpt:
Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.
But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
(…)
Mr. Hofeller’s charge was to assess the impact of drawing political maps that were not based on a state’s total population — the current practice virtually everywhere in the nation — but on a slice of that population: American citizens of voting age.
At the time, the study’s sponsor was considering whether to finance a lawsuit by conservative legal advocates that argued that counting voting-age citizens was not merely acceptable, but required by the Constitution.
Mr. Hofeller’s exhaustive analysis of Texas state legislative districts concluded that such maps “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and would dilute the political power of the state’s Hispanics.
The reason, he wrote, was that the maps would exclude traditionally Democratic Hispanics and their children from the population count. That would force Democratic districts to expand to meet the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement. In turn, that would translate into fewer districts in traditionally Democratic areas, and a new opportunity for Republican mapmakers to create even stronger gerrymanders.
The strategy carried a fatal flaw, however: The detailed citizenship data that was needed to draw the maps did not exist. The only existing tally of voting-age citizens, Mr. Hofeller's study stated, came from a statistical sample of the population largely used by the Justice Department to verify that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was ensuring the voting rights of minority groups.
“Without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire,” Mr. Hofeller wrote, “the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable.”
Roughly 16 months later, as President-elect Trump prepared to take office, Mr. Hofeller urged Mr. Trump’s transition team to consider adding a citizenship question to the census, the transition official responsible for census issues, Mark Neuman, said last year in a deposition in the Manhattan census lawsuit.
The Republicans, without a significant rebranding and de-Trumping, would be rendered increasingly irrelevant by the nation’s shifting demographic reality, if the playing field were level. To be clear, this was an effort of those Republicans to further ensconce their ideological minority in over-represented power. It is also in keeping with their larger project, as I have said elsewhere:
Republicans are currently hostile to an accurate count of people living in this country, because an accurate count would diminish their power. Republicans are hostile to the will of the people, because the will of the people is likely a diminution of their power. Republicans are currently hostile to efforts to get more people to vote, because the more people that vote, the more Republicans’ power would be diminished. Republicans are hostile to executive power, but only in places where they’ve just lost the executive. In short, Republicans are hostile to democracy, because an accurate accounting of the will of the people of this country would result in less power for Republicans. (This happens to also be the primary reason why my brilliant plan to blow up the Electoral College could never, ever happen in this current political reality.) Republicans don’t want to win the game, they want to win the video replay review on a technicality.
Again: the Republicans are seeking to add a question to the 2020 census that originated as a ploy to entrench Republican and white power. In a slightly more reasonable world, this revelation would end any chance of the citizenship question appearing on the 2020 census—not because the Supreme Court would rule against the administration, but because the administration would immediately and with great public self-congratulation remove it themselves. They would recognize that even if they won the day in court, any future gains they made in achieving and maintaining power would be unforgivably tainted with the gross stain of textbook institutional racism.
This will help Republicans and white people achieve and maintain power would, just a few years ago, in the nod-towards-inclusion Republican party of, say, Mitt Romney, be so shameful as to lead to automatic and total disavowal of the question. Now it’s enough to hand-wave it away with cursory denials, and keep fighting to put the question on the census. Because now it’s just part of the brand, and explicitly part of the appeal. Now it’s edgy real-politik, just the game being played at the highest levels. Now Donald Trump will take the heat, but the GOP will have the reins, long after he’s gone.
