Overcoming "Stigmas": Lesbian and Gay Districts and Black Electoral Empowerment

Authors

Darren Rosenblum, St. John's University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Howard Law Journal

Publication Date

1995

Volume

Vol. 39, No.1

First Page

149

Abstract

(Excerpt)

In the United States, historically, members of racial and sexual minority groups have been prevented from effectively participating in governmental decisionmaking because the political districting system denies them adequate representation in the political process. Following the 1990 census, blacks, in particular, saw significant gains in their political representation as a result of redistricting, only to suffer a sharp reduction of their voting rights with the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the Shaw and Miller cases. Whereas voting rights litigation once explored ways to prevent minority vote dilution, today's jurisprudence focuses on the ramifications of the "stigma" faced by blacks in a majority-minority district and the "constitutional right to participate in a 'colorblind' electoral process."

Race-conscious districting provides blacks with some guarantee of political presence in a country defined by the odious oppression of black people. Legal scholars have challenged the putative virtue of racelessness in a society fraught with racist political, economic, and cultural realities—realities that race-consciousness accurately reflects. As one scholar phrases it, "[l]egal discourse uses the language of liberal 'colorblindness,' rather than that of racial inferiority, to undermine racial reform." Even political boundaries, ostensibly raceless, anchor the political imbalance among the races. "Color-blind" district lines can serve a similar function where the electorate is racially polarized, permitting whites to dominate political representation. Race-conscious districting reduces the systematic exclusion of blacks from political power by whites.

In contrast to past judicial activism on behalf of black communities, no laws or courts have attempted structurally to reverse the lack of representation of lesbian and gay interests. Today, only seventy of the nearly one-half million elected officials in the United States are openly lesbian or gay. This underrepresentation is shocking even by the most conservative estimates of the size of the lesbian and gay population. Despite the apparently systemic exclusion of lesbians and gays from political representation, advocates have mobilized to establish some access for lesbian and gay candidates within the current districting system. Although no districting authority officially recognizes lesbian and gay people as a group whose interests must be met by districting schemes, lesbian and gay activists, using community-based evidence, have, to some extent, succeeded in asserting districting claims.

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Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=897569