How long did you wait to vote? Depends on your race

 by Rachel Weiner/The Washington Post

Long lines to vote in last fall’s November have gotten a lot of attention — so much that President Obama has established a commission to tackle the issue. How big a problem was it, really? It depends on your race and where you live, according to a new study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Charles Stewart.

Voters wait in a long line at Greenbriar Middle School Nov. 6, 2012, in Chesapeake, Va. (Brian J. Clark/The Virginia Pilot via Associated Press)

For the majority of voters, lines were not a huge problem. “Two-thirds of voters in 2012 waited less than 10 minutes to vote, and that only 3% of voters waited longer than an hour,” he writes in a new study of the election. The national average wait time actually fell between 2008 and 2012 from 17 to 13 minutes, he finds.

But when it was bad, it was very, very bad. For those who waited longer than an hour, the average reported wait time was 110 minutes. Where was it bad? In Florida, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, wait times exceeded 20 minutes, with Florida voters enduring the worst lines.

There was also significant variation within states. Dense urban areas saw longer lines than less-populated territory. Race was a major factor. ”Viewed nationally, African Americans waited an average of 23 minutes to vote, compared to 12 minutes for whites; Hispanics waited 19 minutes,” Stewart writes.

Again, that comes back to geography. Residents of Zip codes where the population is more than 75 nonwhite waited an average of 24 minutes to vote. Residents of Zip codes where the population is less than a quarter nonwhite waited, on average, 11 minutes.

Stewart notes that the worst lines in 2012 were generally found in the same places where long lines were common in 2008. There is no “magic bullet” to deal with the problem, he says; at this point, “we simply do not know where to start in making things better.”

Obama’s bipartisan commission is tasked with doing exactly that; the group is supposed to deliver a report in six months.

For the study, which will be published in the Journal of Law and Politics, Stewart relied on data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), supplemented by responses to the common core of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and information from county election Web sites. A caveat — these polls were conducted online and do not meet Washington Post polling standards.

Black Like Him: Obama's Narrow Path to Reelection

By Charles P. Pierce

/esquire

These are some things the president of the United States cannot say but that I can say about him. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation to be grateful to the white people who voted him into office. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation not to use the full powers of his office in such a way as to alienate any of the white people who so graciously voted him into office. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation not to use the full advantages of his office in his effort to get those white people to reelect him as their president for another four years. Because those white people voted him into office, his primary job as president is to make sure his entire presidency is a demonstration of how far we've come as a nation on race, and that means he is not allowed to do anything or say anything that the white people who elected him can perceive to be divisive, because his primary function is to make them feel good about themselves. In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the country felt obligated to remind that he know his place.

The rules of the office changed on him just about the second that his hand came off the Bible in January 2009. Every benefit of every doubt that ever was given to every president, good or bad, was not given to him. Now, as he campaigns for reelection, Durham, New Hampshire, kicks up a ruckus because of the amount of money it will cost if he campaigns there. His signature accomplishment, a fundamental restructuring of the nation's health-care system, survived in the Supreme Court, and he was cautioned by voices on both sides of the aisle not to "spike the football," as though what ordinarily would be run-of-the-mill campaign tub-thumping of his primary legislative achievements would be, in his case, unseemly boasting. Imagine someone advising, say, Lyndon Johnson not to campaign on what he'd accomplished as president. You'd need dental records to identify the guy.

It's not the naked racism that's so disturbing — the witch-doctor signs and the postcards featuring watermelons on the White House lawn — or even the carefully coded language of opposition by which some woman from Alabama goes on TV and, weeping, says, "I want my America back," and everybody knows what she means. None of that could surprise anyone who lived through the two campaigns Jesse Jackson ran for president in the 1980s, when it was all out in the open to the point where the artist David Hammons produced a portrait of Jackson as a blond, blue-eyed Nordic and titled it How Ya Like Me Now? (The answer was not very much. The original artwork was destroyed by vandals.) What's made Obama's presidency so difficult, and what has been used against him to considerable effect by those people who are much too civilized to depict him with a bone through his nose, is the tyranny of other people's sanctimony.

Part of it is his fault. He deliberately set himself up as a conciliatory figure. The speech that launched him as a national figure, his keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, presented him as a figure of unity to a country that was coming unglued and would continue to come unglued throughout that election and the four years following it. (The prose in that speech couldn't have been lovelier. The politics of it couldn't have been more naive.) He rang changes on that speech throughout the campaign that made him president in 2008. He offered himself as proof of the nation's greatness and as proof of the nation's atonement for its original sin. And the nation took him up on it. The people who liked him took him up on it and the people who didn't took him up on it. The problem is that once elected, he had to be president, which meant he had to be a politician, which meant he had to offend or anger somebody somewhere, and that is not what we expect our walking absolution to do. Consequently, now that he is running for reelection, he has to run against not only Willard Romney and the Republicans and the naked obvious racism that still exists but also against the sanctimony of the people who thought he was doing them a favor by offering himself up as proof of the country's essential goodness. We must be doing something right. We let a black man be president.

I do not envy him trying to walk this narrow path. In many ways, this president reminds me of the truck drivers in The Wages of Fear, trying to get the nitroglycerine over the mountains without blowing themselves all to hell and gone. In so many ways, he is still outside of things. In so many ways, he is still the flyer the country took in 2008. In so many ways, the path he has to walk to reelection is similar to the path he has had to walk through his life. It was hard not to notice the subtext present in all those earnest warnings about wounding the tender feelings of our financial titans. The president was stepping out of his place. The president was being uppity again.

This is also the case with what is perhaps the most noxious idea out there: that Barack Obama "failed" in his promise to "bring the country together." He's now campaigning in such a way that you might believe he actually wants to be president all over again. He is engaging in politics. Mother of mercy, I swear David Brooks is just going to break down and go all to pieces on PBS some evening over the president's betrayal of his role as the country's anodyne black man and, of course, his upcoming role as black martyr to incivility and discord. It is his duty, dammit, to be all the things that people like Brooks wanted him to be so that he could lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.

It has been hard not to notice that he is the first president in my lifetime who is treated as though he has been given permission by the country to lead it, a permission that can be rescinded at any time, for whatever reason, fair or foul. Ordinarily, I would not find this to be a bad thing at all. Deference to the president — or, as the political scientists and pundits prefer to call it, "respect for the office" — has gotten the country into some terrible trouble over the past fifty-odd years. It is the presiding dynamic by which the war powers have been leached into the executive branch from their true constitutional home in the national legislature. Watergate dragged on for a year longer than it should have because people lined up not necessarily to defend Richard Nixon, although that was bad enough, but to defend the presidency. Iran-Contra was barely punished at all. The previous administration used the atrocities of September 11, 2001, to cement in place what already was there and, even by the end of things, when George W. Bush had committed all the misfeasance and malfeasance and nonfeasance for which his eight years are now rightly reviled, "respect for the office" remained undiminished.

As is the case with so many things, Bill Clinton was the Great Exception. He was treated as a rube and an interloper from the day he arrived in Washington. He was pursued through a Kabuki impeachment process that was inevitable from the day the Republicans found they had the votes to do it. But somehow there was still enough vestigial institutional awe in the office to fend off even that misbegotten adventure. The country simply wasn't going to stand for impeaching an elected president over a series of blowjobs.

But it has been different for this president. Bill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas. It was not epochal that the country had elected a white man, even if he played the saxophone and chased around. (Hell, we'd had Kennedy and LBJ back-to-back thirty years earlier, except for the saxophone part.) But the election of Barack Hussein Obama — and he still jokes on the stump about how nobody voted for anyone with that name because they thought he was a sure thing — was supposed to prove something to the country about itself. Liberals thought it was the culmination of the noble work they'd begun six decades or so earlier. Conservatives thought it was a demonstration of how that work had been completed years before, because their vision of a color-blind America had triumphed. He was a symbol, the fulfillment of everyone's political dreams.

You simply cannot govern that way. Governing is about making choices and fighting on behalf of the choices you make. Obama's own campaign rhetoric always was going to make that difficult, and the interpretation of what his election meant made it almost impossible. He could not respond even to the open racism for fear of validating the noxious stereotypes behind it. Worse, he couldn't be as aggressive as he should have been in battling for his own people — Hello, Van Jones. What's up, Shirley Sherrod? — and his own ideas, because that ran counter to what the country believed his election proved about itself. He made some mildly critical remarks about the profiteers who looted the national economy, and people dove for the fainting couches.

In May, Florida senator Marco Rubio called the president the most "divisive figure in modern American history," which, even if "modern American history" for Rubio is whatever popped up on his BlackBerry in the last fifteen minutes, is plainly preposterous. Rubio was reacting to the president's decision to use an executive order to allow the children of undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows. This was a good and decent thing to do, but it was also damned fine politics and Rubio knew it. And, according to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be "above politics." He wasn't elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an avatar of American tolerance. His attempts to get himself reelected imply a certain, well, ingratitude.

The event of him is still remarkable. The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire. Of course, he can't make full use of that, either, because as we know by virtue of his very election, race is no longer an issue in this country. But the rest of us can make of it what we will. Even in this, his second cautious, no-drama campaign, there remains a sense that you could get in on the making of history again. It's time for Barack Obama to be as bold as he wants the rest of the country to be. If the path is narrow, you might as well run as walk.

The Epistemology of Race Talk

Melissa Harris-Perry/The Nation

I logged onto Twitter on Sunday night and discovered that my recent article for The Nation was causing a bit of a stir. Some members of the white liberal political community are appalled and angry that I suggested racial bias maybe responsible for the President’s declining support among white Americans. I found some responses to my piece to be fair and important, others to be silly and nonresponsive, and still others to be offensive personal attacks. But those categories are par for the course.

I make it a practice not to defend my public writings. Because I often write about provocative topics like race, gender, sexual orientation and reproductive rights, if I defended every piece I wrote against critics I would find little time to sleep. But the responses to this recent article have been revealing in ways that I find typical of our contemporary epistemology of race. Often, those of us who attempt to talk about historical and continuing racial bias in America encounter a few common discursive strategies that are meant to discredit our perspectives. Some of them are in play here.

1. Prove it!

The first is a common strategy of asking any person of color who identifies a racist practice or pattern to “prove” that racism is indeed the causal factor. This is typically demanded by those who are certain of their own purity of racial motivation. The implication is if one cannot produce irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias, then racism must be banned as a possibility. But this is both silly as an intellectual claim and dangerous as a policy standard. 

In a nation with the racial history of the United States I am baffled by the idea that non-racism would be the presumption and that it is racial bias which must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. More than 100 years of philosophical, psychological and sociological research that begins, at least, with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois has mapped the deeply entrenched realities of racial bias on the American consciousness. If anything, racial bias, not racial innocence is the better presumption when approaching American political decision-making. Just fifty years ago, nearly all white Democrats in the US South shifted parties rather than continuing to affiliate with the party of civil rights. No one can prove that this decision was made on the basis of racial bias, but the historical trend is so clear as to require mental gymnastics to imagine this was a choice not motivated by race.

Progressives and liberals should be particularly careful when they demand proof of intentionality rather than evidence of disparate impact in conversations about racism. Recall that initially the 1964 Civil Rights Act made “disparate impact” a sufficient evidentiary claim for racial bias. In other words, a plaintiff did not need to prove that anyone was harboring racial animus in their hearts, they just needed to show that the effects of a supposedly race neutral policy actually had a discernible, disparate impact on people of color. The doctrine of disparate impact helped to clear many discriminatory housing and employment policies off the books.

Michelle Alexander brilliantly demonstrates in The New Jim Crow, the pernicious effect of the Supreme Court moving away from disparate impact as a standard to forcing plaintiffs to demonstrate racist intention. This new standard has encouraged the explosive growth of incarceration of African-Americans, turning a blind eye to disparate impact while it demands “proof” of racial bias.

I believe we must be careful and judicious in our conversations about racism. But I also believe that those who demand proof of interpersonal intention to create a racist outcome are missing the point about how racism works. Racism is not exclusively about hooded Klansmen; it is also about the structures of bias and culture of privilege that infect the left as well.

2. I have black friends

Which brings us to a second common strategy of argument about one’s racial innocence: the “I have black friends” claim. I was shocked and angered when Salon’s Joan Walsh used this strategy in her criticism of my piece. Although I disagree with her, I have no problem with Walsh’s decision to take on the claims in my piece. I consider it a sign of respect to publicly engage those with whom you disagree. I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends. Friendship is a deep and lasting relationship based on shared sacrifice and joys. We are not intimates in that way. Watching Walsh deploy our professional familiarity as a shield against claims of her own bias is very troubling. In fact, it is one of the very real barriers to true interracial friendship and intimacy.

Interracial friendship should, ideally, encourage the desire to investigate one’s own racial privilege and bias, not to use the identity of one’s friends against any claim that such bias even exists. As an ally in LGBT struggles, I have learned this lesson repeatedly. As an ally my role is to speak up for LGBT issues when in heteronormative environments and to shut up when being spoken to by gay and transgendered persons. I was harshly criticized for my failure to account for trans-phobia and trans-hatred and trans-violence in my discussions of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and marriage equality. My critics were absolutely right. My cis-privilege had blinded me to the ways that power was operating very differently for trans-citizens.

Friends certainly criticize friends, but allies also pause to listen. It is completely possible that I am absolutely wrong about white racial bias on the left against President Obama. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong in my political analysis. But listen to this for a moment white allies: many African-Americans (not all, but many) feel that the attacks on President Obama are racialized on both the right and the left. This feeling has meaningful implications for the quality of our national, political fabric. When we tell you that the attacks are racially troubling, painful, we would like you to take our concerns seriously rather than working to simply defend yourself against the claims.

Along with several colleagues I conducted a national survey in 2005 measuring how Americans felt in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The racial gap in how black and white Americans saw the event was striking. A strong majority of white Americans believed the government response has little or nothing to do with race, while an overwhelming number of black Americans believed the response was racialized. No one can “prove” which perception is accurate. But that is beside the point. If more than two-thirds of black citizens believe that their government will allow them to drown and dehydrate and die on national television because of their race, then there is something here worth discussing. And the discussion cannot be about how black people are just too sensitive.

3. Who made you an expert?

This brings me to a final point about racial discourse. It is common for my interlocutors to question my professional, intellectual and personal credentials. It is as though my very identity as an African-American woman makes me unqualified to speak on issues of race and gender; as though I could only be arguing out of personal interest or opinion rather than from decades of research, publication and university teaching.

But this is not personal. In fact, I suspect that those who tell me “I hope you die” or “you are a racist” or “you are a hack” actually know almost nothing about me at all. Rather this is standard strategy used to scorn the study of race as an illegitimate intellectual pursuit. Taking race and gender seriously as objects of academic inquiry is widely maligned, particularly in a social and political world that sees itself through the rose-colored lenses of self-congratulatory post-racialism. A French scholar of the French Revolution could easily write 1,000 words about American Francophone relations without being asked to produce a bibliography of citations, but the same courtesy of professional credibility is pretty regularly denied to black scholars of American racial politics.

This blog is against my better judgment in many ways. Reading it over again, it feels defensive. I am fully aware that I have benefitted from a hugely transformed public space. The struggles of generations of scholars, activists and writers who went before me have cleared unimaginable room for me and so many others to pursue public discourse on topics that were previously silenced, often violently. I am grateful to have readers who take me seriously enough to argue with me and opponents who believe my words are important enough that they make the effort to belittle them.

Further, I am grateful to live in a time when white Americans are furious about anyone suggesting that they are racist. I much prefer to live in a country and at a moment where the idea of being racist is distasteful rather than commonplace. In many ways the angry reaction about even the suggestion of racial bias is a kind of racial progress.

The Party of Lincoln falls short on civil rights.

By Amanda Terkel

The NAACP released its annual report card looking at how federal lawmakers voted on civil rights issues, such as hate crimes, D.C. voting rights, and expanding children’s health insurance. Glenn Thrush looks at some of the main points from the report:

– All Senate Republicans got an F but two (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Maine — they got C’s)

– All Senate Democrats and Independents got A’s, B’s or Incompletes

– Senator Arlen Specter, R-to-D-Penn., got a B

– All House Republicans but 6 got an F — 5 of those 6 got D’s — 1 got a C: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.

– House Republicans scored the lowest of an sub group.

– All BUT 23 House Democrats got A’s, B’s or Incompletes

– All Congressman who scored a 100% were Democrats

– Of the CBC Members ALL but 2 got A’s, Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., who is moderating his stances in prep for a gubernatorial run, got a B.