Reflections on Redistricting

ESSAY Reflections on Redistricting Dan Blue Editor's note: Dan Blue, a lawyerin Raleigh, has servedin the North Carolina House of Representatives since 1981, and thus has had to deal with both legislative and congressional redistrictingfollowing the 1980 and 1990 Censuses. In 1991 Blue was electedSpeaker, the first black to holdthatposition in a southern state in this century, andhepresided over the state Houseforfouryears. Our GuestEditorsfor "The Culture ofSouthern Politics," Ferrel Guillory and ThadBeyle, talkedwith formerSpeakerBlue about his perspectives on redistricting. In the course ofthat interview, the conversation turned to whetherstates ought to have minority-majority districts or to spread black voters' influence across severalwhite-majority districts. Blue's remarks, excerptedhere, speak to the struggle offinding a baknce and to the tenor ofcurrent southernpolitics. 88 olitical campaigns happen to be the ideal place to talk about what your vision for a place ought to be. If, in fact, you can make these debates take shape, considering the whole make-up of a community, racially and odierwise, it doesn't make sense to say that you absolutely have to go in and create independent black districts everywhere. I think that we have to be very careful not to allow the Voting Rights Act to be used as a way to stack all the black votes in a district. That has happened too many times. You simply put everybody who thinks alike in the same district, and it significandy affects the dialogue—the quality of discourse diat will go on within those districts about the key issues. And yet, I don't go so far as some people who say that you should spread out black voters, because then you're like so many pebbles to fill the roadbed. You need, at some point, the kind ofcomfort level for black representatives to articulate fully the issues that impact significandy on the black community so that they do not have to worry about what the white fallout will be. I don't think we are a long way down the road [in getting white voters to vote for black candidates]. I diink that we have much farther to go than any of us thought would be die case even a decade ago. It's much more subde now—the reasons that people won't vote for black candidates—dian it was even ten years ago. Then you could attribute a lot ofthat type ofvoting directiy to race. Today, people won't tolerate a direct appeal to a racist instinct, especially in the urban electorates. (I don't know about such politics in the rural areas.) Over time, they've had black elected officials, developed a rapport with them, and would take it as a personal affront for a direct racist appeal to be used. There are ways to escape the racist label now. It is easy to ascribe a vote for a white candidate instead of a black candidate to party affiliation if your party is overwhelmingly white. And you get a clear demonstration that race is still a controlling factor when you see voting statistics indicating that only 10 percent or 1 5 percent of the white electorate will vote for a black candidate. I'm willing to bet that ifdie Republican Party in the South had halfofthe black voters and the Democratic Party had halfofthe black voters, you would still have some of the same problems in electing black, minority candidates. That's based on somediing that I really can't put my hands on right now, just an intuitive feeling as to where people's positions are now. There is a lack ofdialogue in our politics, so you can't really find out what peoopposite : Speaker Dan Blue, North Carolina House ofRepresentatives. Courtesy ofthe News & ObserverPublishing Co., Raleigh, North Carolina. Reflections on Redistricting 89 pie are thinking anymore. They certainly are not communicating what their real thoughts are. The first thing that we've got to do is to use political campaigns again as the way to establish dialogue and a way to paint a view or a vision ofwhere we ought to be. Campaigns are not being used that way right now. I don't know that you can use...