If you have had a chance to catch even ten minutes of the Republican National Convention and watched at least that much of the other party’s convention here’s a question for you: what is different? I don’t mean the speeches or the political positions we all know those by now, but what looked different?
Here’s a clue: did you see any people of color at the GOP convention? If you did you had to look awfully hard and I don’t mean when the cameras deliberately focused on them. This year’s gathering of the Republican Party illustrates as well as anything why I call them the party of the Counterrevolution. According to a study released by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the GOP Convention has the lowest number of African American delegates in 40 years. That’s 1968!
Here is what the Center said:
Blacks and the 2008 Republican Convention, released today by the nonpartisan research institution that focuses on minority issues, notes that African Americans will comprise only 1.5 percent of the total number of GOP delegates, substantially below the record setting 6.7 percent in 2004.
The 36 black delegates in 2008 represent a 78.4 percent decline from the 167 black delegates at the 2004 GOP convention.
According to the report this is the lowest total since there were 26 African American delegates in 1968 and a record low for the twentieth century of 14 four years before. There were 65 African American delegates in 1912, 49 in 1928, 45 in 1936 during the height of the New Deal and 41 in 1948 even though Harry Truman had desegregated the military and driven the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party.
Thirty-six delegates; less than 2%. That is not merely disgraceful it is, to put it bluntly, against every thing this nation stands for–and. it may be a violation of civil rights.
The Center tried to explain the lack of African American representation:
[It is] a reflection of Senator Obama’s historic candidacy, the deep and genuine enthusiasm for him in the black community, and Senator McCain’s association with President Bush, an exceptionally unpopular figure among African Americans.
Yet the report presents some striking evidence of the Republican Party’s deliberate attempt to exclude African Americans. According to the report there are only seven districts with African Americans nominees running for the House of Representatives this November. There were only nine African American nominees for public office in 2006– the lowest total since 1990 when the table begins. In 2006 only four national Republican candidates received more than 20% of the African American vote in 2006, With Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas receiving the highest total of 26%.
The report notes:
According to Joint Center data, there are 14 black Republicans in state offi ce (including state legislatures) and 40 black Republicans in local offi ce across the country. There are approximately 10,000 black elected officials in the United States, but since a majority of elected offices are nonpartisan, there are probably additional black Republican officeholders who have been elected to nonpartisan offices.
Regardless of the report’s attempt to gild this appalling statistic 54 black Republicans out of 10,000 is a figures that defies any other explanation than that the Republican Party deliberately discriminates against African Americans. As the United States has an African American running for President under a major party for the first time, the Republican Party seems to be moving the other direction. With only 54 people to choose from, where will the national Republican candidates come from? With only 2% of the delegates to the national convention being African American, where even will future local candidates come from?
But the statistics get even more shocking. It is one thing to say that maybe the Republican Party is unable to recruit African American candidates, but what about membership on the Republican National Committee, which is something the Party can control. According to the report:
At the present time, the 165 member RNC has one black member: Ms. Lilliana Belardo De O’Neal, committeewoman from the U.S. Virgin Islands. Th ere is also a Republican National Committeeman-elect from South Carolina.
So the RNC has no African Americans from the United States proper.
How does this impact the politics of the GOP? Again the study tells us:
Th e Joint Center released the results of a national survey of African American adults on July 29, 2008, and the findings indicate that at this time, economic concerns and rising gas and energy prices have come to dominate the concerns of African Americans, with 42 percent saying the economy is the most important problem facing the country today; 65.1 percent indicated that the economy was one of the three most important national problems. In addition to the economy, 17 percent said that rising gas and energy prices were the most important national problem, and 45.4 percent thought rising gas prices were among the top three national problems.
So now we come to the major question: does the GOP’s exclusion constitute illegal discrimination against African Americans? In a moral sense there is little question that it does. But what about legally?
I am no constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me a case could be made that the Republican Party is deliberately violating the Civil Rights Act. Here we enter the minefield of de facto vs de jure discrimination. For those who don’t know their Latin, de jure means that it is deliberately written into the law or rules where as de facto means that the evidence is overwhelming that discrimination is occurring.
As far back as Brown V Board civil rights lawyers have made the case that prime evidence of de facto segregation lies in the numbers. For example, if the Republican Party were a corporation, the lawyers would be all over them for discrimination by virtue of their having so few African Americans represented. If a major corporation had only one African American in its entire management team, like the Republican National Committee, there is little doubt they would be in court and probably subject to Justice Department action.
But when we talk about political parties we enter a gray area. Nothing in the Civil Rights laws directly addresses political parties. Private organizations, say a local garden club, do not have to comply with the Civil Rights law unless their bylaws say that they will not admit people of color. The Republican bylaws, of course, do not deliberately exclude African Americans, but clearly they are being made to feel unwelcome in the GOP.
One would have to uncover memos and solicit testimony from GOP officials that would confirm they are deliberately excluding African Americans. While it might be enlightening to grill the current RNC on its appalling statistics, none of those officials is stupid enough to testify that they are deliberately excluding people of color.
So then all we have to go on is the numbers. Some examples of how this has worked:
In 1991, testing of new car dealerships in Chicago indicated that dealerships offered significantly lower prices to white males than to similarly situated black and/or female testers: A white woman was asked to pay forty percent higher markups than white male testers; a black man was asked to pay more than twice the markup, and a black women was asked to pay more than three times the markup of white male testers. This comment extends the results of this initial testing by presenting not only more authoritative evidence of discrimination, but also a new quantitative method of identifying the causes of discrimination.
Here is another one:
Discrimination and prejudice against minorities remains the best explanation for racial housing segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas, a new study in Los Angeles suggests.
Other common explanations for segregation — that racial groups choose to live together or that minorities can’t afford to buy houses or rent apartments in white neighborhoods — were not supported by the study.
The research also found that, among minority groups, Blacks suffered the greatest amount of discrimination and prejudice. White hostility against Blacks and institutional discrimination against Black homebuyers were some of the contributing factors to segregation.
A 2004 Princeton study found:
These results indicate that employers do treat job seekers differently on the basis of race and criminal record, even relative to otherwise equally qualified applicants. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that employer discrimination along the lines of
race, ethnicity, and criminal conviction status remains a salient source of inequality in contemporary urban labor markets.
But still is this legitimate legal evidence? The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission outlines the guidelines for discrimination:
Equal employment opportunity cannot be denied any person because of his/her racial group or perceived racial group, his/her race-linked characteristics (e.g., hair texture, color, facial features), or because of his/her marriage to or association with someone of a particular race or color. Title VII also prohibits employment decisions based on stereotypes and assumptions about abilities, traits, or the performance of individuals of certain racial groups. Title VII’s prohibitions apply regardless of whether the discrimination is directed at Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Arabs, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, multi-racial individuals, or persons of any other race, color, or ethnicity.
An EOEC FAQ on “How can employers avoid racial discrimination on the job?” states:
Employers should not only strive to recruit and hire in a way that provides equal opportunity for workers of all backgrounds to obtain jobs, but should also ensure that race and color discrimination are not barriers to employees’ success once they are in the job. Race or color should not affect work assignments, performance evaluations, training opportunities, discipline, or any other term or condition of employment, except in appropriate circumstances as set forth at Section 15-VI-C of the Compliance Manual section on Race and Color Discrimination.
In the 1977 Hazlewood case Justice Potter Stewart ruling for the majority states:
We also noted that statistics can be an important source of proof in employment discrimination cases, since “absent explanation, it is ordinarily to be expected that nondiscriminatory hiring practices will in time result in a work force more or less representative of the racial and ethnic composition of the population in the community from which employees are hired. Evidence of longlasting and gross disparity between the composition of a work force and that of the general population thus may be significant even though 703 (j) makes clear that Title VII imposes no requirement that a work force mirror the general population.”
If one accepts the premise of the Hazlewood decision then the RNC is guilty of discrimination. Of course, it is unlikely anyone will ever file a lawsuit against the GOP, their discrimination still has several consequences. First, the question arises as to whether it will nurture a racist campaign against Barack Obama. Second, the GOP has deliberately written off people of color.
The consequences of this for America’s future are scary, to say the least. If one of the two major political parties essentially turns its back on people of color and morally if not legally defies the implications of the Civil Rights Act, then we have an extremely volatile situation that threatens to become much worse than the 1960s. More pointedly it says to people of color that one major political party does not welcome you and by doing so sanctions the racism that still exits in the dark corners of America.
It has been over half a century since Ralph Ellison wrote his immortal opening to Invisible Man, but the words still resonate when you watch the GOP delegates covorting on TV:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook,
like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe – nor
am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and
liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind.
I am invisible, undetected, simply because people refuse to see me
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
