The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #75366   Message #1323701
Posted By: Nerd
11-Nov-04 - 03:57 PM
Thread Name: BS: Fuck the south
Subject: RE: BS: Fuck the south
Yes, GUEST, but that wasn't the question.   No one said anything about which STATE elected the most black politicians. You're just changing the terms of the question to sound more favorable for your partisan side.

The question was whether the South as a region elects more blacks than other regions.

Even this question was selected by Larry K, and it's not a very good question; since there are few blacks in Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, we wouldn't expect a lot of blacks elected from there. A better question would be: which region's cohort of black politicians compares most favorably with the size of its black population? Is there a region that elects more blacks than one would expect given their representation in the general population of the region? I don't know, and I suspect Larry K doesn't either.

Beyond that, Larry K has made the suggestion that the REASON for his unproved and possibly irrelevant assertion about the South is because the South is unusually enlightened. As I pointed out, there are other reasons why black people get elected from the South:

1) because there are a lot of Black people there (remember why that is, GUEST and LarryK? Hint: Because of the enlightened South's enjoyment of the institution of SLAVERY).

2) because it has been gerrymandered to create black districts and disenfranchise white Democrats. This is known as "cracking and packing": you crack existing districts up, then pack all the Democrats into as few majority districs as possible, distributing the rest of the Democrats into Republican districts. I don't need to look at movies about the sixties, GUEST, because the Texas Republican legislature forced through this exact kind of Gerrymandering last year. Blacks gained a seat or two, which was calculated into the plan to circumvent a challenge under the Voting Rights Act. In the meantime, Democrats will have lost six or seven seats when all of them come up for re-election.

You can read a Washington Post article on it here