Pols306 Final And The white Writer’s Burden

Posted On 2021-05-15

From the Race/Ethnicity final. Just the last half, the first wasn’t very good reading. This was the professor who assigned a ton a of writing. Between her three classes I got 1 A and 2 B’s. I’m really wondering if those B’s couldn’t have been fixed by some legitimate proofreading. There is some solid carelessness and overly-clever writing happening here- I had to re-read the last answer’s last paragraph three times before I understood what I was trying to say and added the last sentence just for this post. And I know there are grammatical rules on the subject, but I’m always hazy in practice on the notion of capitalization. I’m inclined to capitalize Black or Latino so as not to be disrespectful, but I’m not inclined to capitalize whites because we elevate ourselves well enough on our own. In serious writing though, it’s clearly partisan to favor one elevation over another, so it’s either B and W or b and w. ‘Latino’ on the other hand straddles grey areas between race and ethnicity, so in my mind is doesn’t automatically correspond to racial capitalization. So who the hell knows, really.

Also I don’t use Latinx for the reason I don’t use Blackx or Whitex. It’s not a thing.

• This semester we began by understanding the construction of race in American political history and its effect on identity, representation, and democracy. The latter half of the semester we examined specific research in political science that applies these ideas to understand important current issues of race and ethnicity in American politics. Choose two of these six articles (from the group presentations) and explain why and how the findings of these articles are important to our understanding of the politics of race and ethnicity as well as the American political system. Explain and use specific examples from various readings.

The materials presented to the class by the student groups illuminated different aspects of minority identity and representation. From groups 4 and 5, the interviews shared by Jean Schroedel and Artour Aslanian about the Indian electoral experience, and the data exploring partisanship and black voting patterns by Amir Fairdosi and Jon Rogowski, combine to provide several insights into the idea of how voters see themselves in the candidates running. 

Through their research, Schroedel and Aslanian illustrate the importance of descriptive representation. The elected officials they’ve spoken to relay tales of persisting through obstacles to identify solutions for poorer Native counties. In confronting a road repair challenge one representative explained his approach, “…We don’t have that kind of money. My thing is, how can we work with these other entities to try and meet the needs of our communities?” (Schroedel & Aslanian, p. 274, emphasis added) A non-Native representative would be less likely to see himself as part of a Native community or apply the same level of determination. Interview subjects would later describe the importance of their presence as a deterrent to the passage of problematic legislation. “Without a Native perspective up there,” one said, “it would be scary to see what would happen” (Schroedel & Aslanian, p. 276). Characterizations such as these are direct examples as to the importance of descriptive representation to minority groups. An indirect validation would be the depiction of voter repression at Native polling places. If whites are so determined to silence the voice of two percent of the electorate, what that two percent can say must be pretty powerful.

An extensive set of 2010 polling data is the foundation for study by Fairdosi and Rogowski into a partisan component of descriptive representation. Beginning with the knowledge that black voters offer greater support to black candidates and that blacks overwhelmingly identify as Democrats, they confirmed that black Republicans were the exception to the minority empowerment generalization that people look out for their own. Black liberal voters were not looking for black candidates, they were looking for liberal candidates. And if there was a shared ethnicity, so much the better. But ideology proved to be a more significant descriptive element than race alone- black voters would choose a white Democrat over a black Republican (Fairdosi & Rogowski, p. 341). The implication is that race alone is just one of the filters that can be applied by voters to identify who their most compatible candidate might be, and just one of the avenues a candidate can explore for common ground with voters. 

Together, these studies illustrate imperfections in our representative process, and the importance of having the data necessary to understand events. To be fair, every candidacy is a compromise. The only person to whom a representative could be truly descriptive is their sentence-finishing twin. Awareness of those imperfections is important though. As a body of work, these studies have value not only for students in the process of learning, but also for legislators in the process of leading. That descriptive representation can be so important to some constituencies is essentially proof that their current representatives are not listening to enough of the right voices. 

• Read the following article:  https://wapo.st/2Gr1q1U (Links to an external site.)and critically analyze its implications for representation and democracy using themes, ideas, research, and readings we’ve discussed this semester.

Arguments recently made before the Supreme Court will determine whether or not a question is added to the 2020 census asking after respondents’ citizenship status. The direct effect of such a change would be an undercount of immigrant peoples throughout the country. Indirectly, if “citizen-only” counts were used for the drawing of district lines, the diversification of representation could be stunted for at least a decade. To the population being counted, the question would represent a possible threat in a time when ICE raids are broadcast on the evening news. Those with the least reason to trust the intentions of government would be presented with validation of their suspicions. Institutionally, redistricting laws would be looked at in a new light, as would be the makeup of the Court.

Projecting from materials in the course, an increase in voter distrust of government or a decrease in available representation would contribute to a decrease in political participation (Fairdosi & Rogowski, 2015, p. 338). Combined decreases in representation and participation could contribute to a cycle that decreases any form of descriptive representation to levels completely divorced from actual populations. It becomes important to ask then what the actual results of such a census count would look like, and what the effects would be. Researchers at Harvard have posited that a citizenship question would result in the undercount of more than 4 million people (Brown, 2019). Michael Wines describes in the New York Times (2019) how districts in Austin (by way of an example) would need to be redrawn to maintain an equivalence of recorded population. Urban districts take up less space than rural districts due to their differing population densities, but urban areas have greater densities of immigrant and non-citizen populations. Were noncitizens to be excluded from estimations of population density, small urban districts would need to be drawn larger to incorporate replacements for the people who “aren’t” there. Urban Democratic voters would thus be packed into fewer districts and their influence diluted. Nationwide, mapping company Social Explorer has constructed an online tool that projects district variations to illustrate what a hypothetical non-citizenship census would look like (“Social Explorer Tool”, 2019).

Representation however is not the only thing at stake. Census data informs the portioning of federal funds; consider the effect on the hypothetical districts of downtown Austin. Currently, these areas provide services to their people that are paid for in part by federal money, X amount of dollars per resident. However, a district that is redrawn to include only citizens in an urban area will contain thousands more non-citizens as well. When “X dollars per resident” becomes “X dollars per citizen”, the amount of spending on actual residents could become mere fractions of a dollar per resident. To maintain treasuries, services would need to be cut; to maintain services, taxes would need to be increased. There would be a literal cost borne by people in these places.

A ruling in favor of the question would have legislative ramifications as well. States at risk of losing seats would be motivated to implement protections to salvage as much influence as possible. In Pennsylvania, a redistricting dispute has been turned aside by the Supreme Court because the applicable terms are defined in the state’s constitution. Protecting representative circumstances from judicial review could easily become a priority (Thomson-DeVeaux, 2019). In the event of Democratic victory at the ballot box, a favorable ruling could well be the tipping point towards an increase in the headcount of justices on the Court. The alternative would be a decade of waiting until the 2030 census, with no guarantee of correction even by then.

It’s worth pointing out that criticisms of our electoral systems justifying “citizen-only” maps are not without merit. (LOL I have no idea what this sentence is saying! I read it over and over again to try to figure out how to make the thought more clear for this post, but I have no clue what thought it’s trying to convey :D) Returning to the varying differences between citizen and non-citizen populations, conservative advocate Ed Blum points out that in districts of equivalent residency, the different numbers of citizens (i.e. actual voters) present can require substantially inflate or deflate the influence of those votes, and place differing electoral demands on candidates for office (Wines, 2019). There are grey areas of representation in which the presence of non-citizen minorities may be working to limit the ability of citizen minorities to secure equitable representation. Put practically, a large non-citizen Latino population may limit the level of descriptive representation available to all Latinos.