Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Affirmative Action: African American and Jewish Perspectives \\ 333
Constitution seeks to weld together as one," would think that the Constitution
has been interpreted to affirmatively promote racial desegregation. The plaintiffs
in each of the challenges to majority-minority districts have never taken a single
action to promote housing or school desegregation; most of the other critics of
majority-minority districts have never done so either. As a nation, we have virtually
given up on school desegregation, and "socially engineered" housing segregation
dominates demographic patterns across the country. 32 Although white
Americans flee schools and neighborhoods populated by black people, they are
deeply offended when African Americans voluntarily embrace racial segregation.
While majority-minority electoral districts cannot fairly be described as "segregation"
(in spite of the Supreme Court's insistence otherwise), it is nonetheless
ironic, at best, that when black people seek to empower themselves within the
segregated communities that white Americans have created, they are accused of
promoting racial "balkanization" and "political apartheid."
Just as unfair is the argument that majority-minority districts are hurting
Democrats by concomitantly causing adjacent congressional districts to become
more white, and thus more conservative. 33 Whatever the merits of that charge
may be, why must black people be the ballast for the Democratic Party? Why do
the critics not ask why white voters, left to their own devices, elect representatives
with conservative agendas that these same critics apparently believe are
undesirable? Why is the focal point of their ire not the white voters? No other
community is asked to forego any meaningful opportunity to elect candidates
from its midst; why expect black voters to do so? And as for the argument that
majority black districts ultimately frustrate the interests of black communities
(an argument that at least admits that such interests exists) because their elected
representatives simply become a minority within a minority party, in many southern
jurisdictions the election of white Democrats has not guaranteed that those
interests will be protected.
As for African Americans and Jews, for the most part majority-minority districts
do not present constant conflicts, since they have primarily been attacked in
the South. 34 Nonetheless, redistricting has been a flashpoint of tensions for the
two communities. Early in his Administration's tenure, President Bill Clinton
nominated University of Pennsylvania law professor and former NAACP Legal
Defense Fund voting rights lawyer Lani Guinier to be Assistant Attorney General
of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Conservative
lawyer Clint Bolick was granted a platform by the Wall Street Journal's editorial
staff to engage in an unprincipled attack on Professor Guinier that distorted her
writings and her career into the label "Quota Queen." Guinier had written some
law review articles suggesting a way out of the quandary of geographic districting
that relied heavily on racial residential segregation. Her articles suggested
consideration of alternative schemes such as cumulative voting, which has been
adapted in some American jurisdictions and is commonplace in other democracies.
In addition to the advantage of breaking the link between residential segre-