Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Affirmative Action: African American and Jewish Perspectives \\ 331
the U.J.O. plaintiffs advanced a claim aimed at protecting their political interest
as Jews. 23
The legal ambiguities in the U.J.O. plaintiffs' claims mirror an apparent
inconsistency in the manner in which Jews opposed to majority-minority electoral
districts (or for that matter, affirmative action in employment or education)
argue that color blindness empties African Americans' race and its attendant historical
experiences of any content worthy of special recognition or treatment even
as their Jewish-ness is a point of religious, cultural and historical identity and
provides the lens through which they see the world. 2/l Jews' historical experience,
culminating in the Holocaust, as an of oppressed, often hated minority is in part
the raison d'etre for the Nation-State of Israel. While pre-Holocaust Zionists
asserted a biblical and historical claim to Palestine, Israel also exists as the result
of a brutal genocidal experience which Jews have pledged never to allow to happen
again. Thus, like African Americans, Jews' common interests are founded, at
least in part, on their status as an oppressed minority group. 25 When some Jews
argue that majority-minority districts for African Americans constitute unfair
discrimination against white (or Jewish) Americans and that African Americans
have no common interests that demand protection in view of historical and continuing
racial discrimination in the political process and elsewhere in American
life, their opposition reflects an approach to individual/group identity issues that
is very different from that applied to matters of concern to the Jewish community.
The ADL engaged in precisely this contradiction when it filed its amicus brief
in Miller. 26
The ADL's amicus curiae brief in Miller stated that it "submits this brief to
advance its conviction that redistricting substantially motivated by racial considerations
impairs the liberties secured by the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution." In the ADL's view,
"such state action offends core equal protection principles, is inimical to democratic
values, and undermines the fundamental importance of the franchise to our
society and democratic system of government." 27 The ADL's position in Miller
was vindicated by a 5—4 vote of the Court. It is, however, like the Supreme Court's
analysis, flawed in that it ignores the entire context in which majority-minority
districts are drawn pursuant to the Voting Rights Act, and in that it views the
interests and participation of African Americans voters in a bizarre fashion. Like
the Court, the ADL simply ignores the overwhelming power of racial bloc voting
by white voters. In jurisdiction after jurisdiction in state after state throughout
the South, African American candidates had never been elected to Congress or to
state and local offices before the advent of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana is not
atypical. In Louisiana, since Reconstruction, no black candidate has been elected
to Congress from a majority white district; no black candidate has been elected to
the state legislature from a majority white district. No black person has been
elected to statewide office. And in 1991, if left to the majority (55 percent) of
white voters, David Duke would have been elected Governor of Louisiana. 28
Racially polarized voting 29 similar to that which has dominated and contin-