Until Texas Democrats Can Organizationally Reach the State’s Latinos, Texas Will Never Turn “Purple” Paul Stekler
It’s been a constant refrain of Texas Democrats, wandering in the electoral wilderness for 20 years: When the Hispanic electorate finally arrives at the polls in the numbers they make up in the state’s population, everything will change. It’s the dream of waking the sleeping giant of Texas politics and turning the state blue. In our short film about Texas, part of the “Postcards from the Great Divide” series, former U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego remembers “a big poster that said ‘the ’80s were the decade of the Hispanic, and then the ’90s were the decade of the Hispanic, and then the 2000s.’” In an election year that many expected to see an anti-Trump surge of Latinos, the surge never came. In a South Texas district that is more than 70 percent Hispanic, Gallego lost his bid to recapture his seat. For now, the sleeping giant still sleeps. Latinos will become the largest ethnic group in Texas by 2017, with more than 40 percent of the population, yet they make up less than 20 percent of the voters. The reasons given for this disconnect are familiar to political observers. The Latinos are disproportionately young, and young adults don’t vote. In small towns and rural areas, there are social and sometimes economic pressures not to publicly participate. Gerrymandering, no longer under the review of the Voting Rights Act, also makes districts so uncompetitive that there’s little incentive to vote. Finally, multiple research studies of voter ID laws find that they decrease the voter participation of minority communities. The challenge in Texas, though, is deeper than that. If potential voters don’t see the importance of voting, how it impacts their day-to-day lives,
almost nothing can get them to register and vote. Pasadena, just outside of Houston — once a white, working-class town — is now nearly 65 percent Latino. In our film, we profile a successful small-business owner who had emigrated from Monterrey, Mexico, and run unsuccessfully for a City Council seat in a redrawn district that would never have been approved under the old Voting Rights Act supervision. Undeterred, he tirelessly worked to motivate potential voters, but many didn’t feel any connection to politics. Others said that nobody has ever come to their door and asked them to vote. For some, voter ID laws created a fear of political participation. Consider Nevada as an example of what could happen if, and when, the Latino electorate flexes its political muscle in Texas. In our Nevada film, it’s clear that the state GOP was well aware that they had to make inroads with Latino votes. Their problem was that the Culinary Workers Union, allies of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, was already organized and working on the ground. In an election result that was the reverse of what happened nationally, Democrats took back both houses of the state Legislature, captured two new congressional seats, and held Reid’s Senate seat by electing the first Latina to the U.S. Senate. Democrats did it with a wave of Latino votes. Texas has no comparable democratically allied organization, even in the large cities. Until Democrats can reach and motivate Latinos, by whatever means, things will progress slowly. American politics is candidate-centric, and the best candidates have the ability to rebrand their party and to reshape and transform the electoral landscape. Without that knight on a white horse, though, if Democrats pin all their hopes on an expanded Latino vote without organizationally reaching them, it’ll be a long time until Democrats turn Texas purple, let alone blue. Paul Stekler is the chair of the Radio-TelevisionFilm Department in the Moody College of Communication at U.T. He is one of tthe executive producers of the nine-state “Postcards from the Great Divide” series, all viewable at politicalpostcards.org.
Trump’s cabinet is the most powerful example to date of the Neoconfederacy resumption of power By Peniel Joseph
The selection of Ben Carson to be secretary of housing and urban development is yet more evidence that Donald Trump and his transition team are embracing an approach that uses race as cover for a return to the racially oppressive past. Carson, whose professional ascent was aided by civil rights victories and affirmative action, has pointedly rejected the very methods that allowed him to access opportunities that were unheard of in America’s pre-civil rights years. He will lead an agency tasked with helping combat poverty and support vulnerable Americans, but Carson has openly dismissed the idea that government can be trusted with that work. It isn’t just that Carson isn’t qualified; his selection in combination with Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and Jeff Sessions as attorney general suggests that America is headed toward becoming a Neoconfederacy. By publicly nominating officials who in a different era would have worn their defiance against racial integration and voting rights as a badge of honor, Trump has publicly sanctioned the politics of massive resistance against civil rights and social justice into an extension of the federal government. This is not only stunning, but dangerously echoes the nation’s post-Reconstruction period of “Redemption.” The “redeemer” South derived its name from efforts by white politicians, business leaders and the working class to restore the racial and economic advantages of pre-Civil War America through legal and violent means. Over the course of a brutal 30-year stretch at the
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end of the 19th century, they accomplished exactly that, ridding virtually the entire south of black elected officials, disenfranchising black voters and decimating the notion of equal citizenship. Northern leaders turned a blind eye to the southern horrors of lynching, segregation and racial violence that became normalized enough for a sitting president, Woodrow Wilson, to rid the entire federal workforce of black workers and express public admiration for D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece of racial dissemblance, “The Birth of a Nation.” The modern civil rights era opened a racial Pandora’s box that exposed deeply rooted myths about racial slavery and the injustice of Jim Crow, among others. While politicians such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond became icons of the unreconstructed South, political transformations in the rest of the country made such flagrant displays of anti-black racism counterproductive. Fast forward to when Trump identified himself as both the “law and order” candidate and the voice of a new “silent majority.” Then he innovated a set of rules, using the word “Chicago” as a metaphor for black rage, lawlessness and poverty, exploiting the tragic deaths of law enforcement officers to spark fears of a nationwide crime wave, and publicly supporting “stop and frisk” measures that have been proved to be racially discriminatory and unconstitutional. America has a long, shameful history when it comes to race and a capacity to allow for the degradation of whole populations based on race, religion, gender, sexuality and difference. We have come too far as a nation to return to an era when people of color, women, and gays and lesbians enjoyed far fewer rights than they do now. The first step in resisting these efforts is not reaching out to the voters whose resistance to the idea of racial equality, let alone justice, made this possible. It lies in recognizing the larger danger in mainstreaming racism as a political and governing strategy. We all must summon the moral courage to resist the rhetorical sleight of hand that bashes civil rights as identity politics, identify the “alt-right” as the white supremacists and white nationalists that they are, and label Trump’s impending Cabinet as the most powerful example to date of the Neoconfederacy resumption of power. Peniel Joseph is a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin.