The Justice Department Is Trying To Establish Minority White Control For Another Generation

We all know that America is becoming a majority-minority nation. And most of us know that the only way to truly stop this Deplorable crap is for non-white people to wrest political control from white people. Trump is here because white people are afraid of that happening and, you know what, they’re not wrong to be afraid. As far as I’m concerned, Obama was the best these gun-and-religion-clinging assholes were going to get. The next time the bottom rail is on top, I truly hope racist white people get to witness the power of a fully armed and operational “Obama coalition” of minorities, women who’ve had enough, and white guys who don’t need to put prosthetic scrotums on their cars to feel like men. That’s the future, and when we get there you people who pour water out in the middle of the desert are gonna pay.

But, that future is still decades off. In the meantime, it seems like there are just enough white men left to run things however they want, at least as long as their wives rate being treated as “white” more important than being treated as “human.”

The question then just becomes: How long can white people keep pulling this s**t and getting away with it? Republicans are hopeful that it won’t catch up with them in 2018. Even if they lose the House, they’re confident that there are enough racists left in Missouri and West Virginia and Nebraska to make the Senate safe for THE WALL and other such intellectual detritus. 2020 is still anyone’s guess. But considering that Trump’s bigoted base has never left him, other Republicans can’t win a primary without that base, and Democrats can’t put a forkful of waffles in their mouth without coughing up the ball, I’d say that things still look pretty good for Trump’s chance at a second term. I know a lot of people are looking at the Mueller investigation as a sign of hope, as if Paul Ryan isn’t just sitting their with his ball in a trophy case at Mar-A-Lago, but my guess is that nobody kills Humperdinck.

Thing is, Republicans can read the demographic tea leaves as well as anybody. They know what’s coming. In the face of that, the GOP had a choice to either expand its base to appeal to non-whites or retrench as the party of white grievance and come up with some way to establish white control over a more populous non-white population. Republicans have emphatically, consistently, and I believe irrevocably chosen the latter path.

Enter the 2020 Census. No matter what the demographics of the country are, they don’t matter unless the Census recognizes it that way. It’s the Census that sets the parameters of electoral power.

For years, Republicans have fought against a statistical count of our population, for a far more inaccurate “direct” count of the population. The Census already overvalues whites and homeowners over minorities and city-dwellers and transient peoples. That is an inaccuracy baked into our system that Republicans have no desire to address. Now, they’d like to go further. From the Washington Post:

A request by the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census could shift the nation’s balance of political power from cities to more rural communities over the next decade and give Republicans a new advantage drawing electoral boundaries…

The citizenship question is a particularly fraught one because noncitizens, who may not vote, nonetheless are counted for the purposes of distributing federal funding, apportioning congressional seats and drawing district maps for state and local elections.

What the Justice Department is trying to do is transparently racist. They’re trying to intimidate non-citizens into not filling out the forms, out of fear that ICE will come for them. They’ve done all the work into making ICE a paramilitary gestapo, and this is step two. We know that during Hurricane Harvey, immigrants were running away from help in order to avoid being entrapped by ICE agents. Ignoring the Census form is a comparatively easy call.

And that’s terrible because non-citizens ARE eligible for government services, and the Census is our main way of apportionment for those services. NON-CITIZENS PAY TAXES, you freaking xenophobic bigots, OF COURSE they should be get their share of services.

We have a word for what Republicans are trying to do: apartheid. That’s what we call it when a racially homogeneous population tries to rule a larger population through rules and laws that prevent the larger population from exercising political power. With this Census trick, Republicans are trying to make it so that many brown people are not even counted.

That’s how they plan to win. That’s their ONLY STRATEGY for winning in the years and decades to come. There are so many non-white people that for white people to retain their monopoly on power, they’ll have to literally stop counting non-whites.

It might work. From their perspective, it better work. Barack Obama was the Nelson Mandela for the aggrieved white man, offering an array of gifts to disadvantaged whites across this country. They rejected him, and replaced him with an open bigot. Obama offered white people actual equality and they replaced him with a person who promises white supremacy.

If that wheel ever clicks back around, it’s going to look a lot different. This isn’t a political game. Trump and the Republicans are right now breeding a generation of non-whites who are learning firsthand how white people behave when their power is not mitigated by any sense of racial equity or basic shame. We are learning that, left to their own devices and in control of all branches of government, white “conservatives” are cruel, bigoted, and hypocritical about their Christian or spiritual beliefs. They see that, given the slightest opportunity, whites will move to retract voting rights from non-whites, forcibly split up families, empower the police to commit atrocities, and side with Nazis. White conservatives are doing what they’ve always done when white progressives let them do it.

Only this time, non-whites are not as politically powerless as we have been in previous iterations of America. There’s going to come a time when we don’t have to beg nice white people to please stop siccing the dogs on us. There’s going to come a time where non-whites’ requests become demands. I might not be alive to see it. People like me are not going to be around to be a problem. But it would behoove white conservatives to think about what problems they are creating. What lessons are we teaching future black and brown leaders about the white man’s capacity for cooperation and power-sharing?

Either the current Republican attempt to permanently establish a system where white minorities can rule non-white majorities will succeed… or it won’t. And if it doesn’t work, aggrieved whites will be talking about Obama like his name was Bagger Vance.

Potential citizenship question in 2020 Census could shift power to rural America [Washington Post]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.