Minority Representation in U.S. Politics on One

¶ … Minority Representation in U.S. Politics

On one hand, some have made the argument that the historic election of the nation's first African-American President indicates that we now live in a so-called "post-racial" America. On the other hand, there is a good argument that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 rekindled the antagonism toward minorities in general and African-Americans in particular in those states that were formerly part of the Civil-War-era Confederacy. Immediately after the Obama victory and even before the inauguration of the new President, a contingent of Republican Senators, lead by Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, pledged to make sure that they used their votes in the Senate to block anything the newly-elected President tried to do.

The efforts of those legislators to undermine the presidency of the first black president before he even took office was matched throughout the former Confederate states by a concerted effort by Republican governors and election officials to redraw congressional districts, change the laws apportioning the electoral votes of states (Bouie, 20131), and to do just about everything imaginable to disenfranchise minority voters to prevent another major Democratic victory (Bouie, 20132). Specifically, legislation was proposed and passed in states like Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to reduce the number of congressional districts with large populations of African-Americans, Hispanics, young voters, and other demographic groups considered likely to vote Democratic (Bouie, 20132).

In addition to redrawing congressional district lines, Republican governors and election officials began systematically imposing voting identification restrictions that were neutral on their face but obviously intended to disenfranchise minority voters as well as female voters. For example, the new requirement in some states that female voters register and vote only under their legal names, irrespective of the fact that they might have always continued to vote under their maiden names, greatly complicated the process of voting, as noted recently in national headlines because those new regulations affected several female members of Congress and at least one federal judge.