Republicans are waging a propaganda push to hide the racist impact of their efforts to gerrymander congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
A couple of weeks back, Rep. Al Green, flanked by fellow members of the Texas Democratic congressional delegation, browbeat members of the media at a news conference. Green’s gripe? That the mainstream press wasn’t, in his view, doing an effective job of conveying the functional racism at play in the Donald Trump-backed gerrymandering effort in Texas, which is deliberately designed to target majority-Black and majority-Latino districts.
Unfortunately, we have grown to the point in this country where you can use racism against people of color, but people of color can’t respond and say, ‘That’s racism.’ If we do, you’re not going to print it. You’re not going to carry it. What you’re going to do is allow the racist statement to prevail. And what we try to do to fight it — by indicating that it IS racist — you allow that to just be words that evaporate into nothingness.
It was a warning that conservatives can obscure the true intent or result of this discriminatory assault on democracy if members of the press won’t plainly depict it as such. And as Republicans spread misinformation over their gerrymandering efforts, it’s hard to argue with him.
The examples are mounting.
Just last week, Harmeet Dhillon, the civil rights-averse head of the DOJ’s civil rights division, claimed during an interview that the racist gerrymandering effort in Texas isn’t truly racist but, instead, an effort to dismantle the “racial spoils” that Democrats have purportedly reaped from laws designed to combat racist gerrymandering. This, of course, is not true. My colleague Hayes Brown recently wrote an excellent op-ed explaining how Texas Republicans are making a mockery of the Voting Rights Act. And, as my former colleague Joy Reid detailed in a recent Substack post, it’s abundantly clear that the Texas GOP’s plan will disenfranchise nonwhite voters — particularly, Black ones.
But seemingly not to be outdone by Dhillon’s propaganda, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed in a Fox News interview over the weekend that Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, is the real racist — for having the gall to highlight the racism in the gerrymandering effort. Abbott essentially claimed that the GOP plan couldn’t possibly be racist, because it would create additional Hispanic-majority districts, though that obviously doesn’t preclude the maps from being racist to Black people — and it’s worth noting that the new districts were were drawn specifically to favor conservative-leaning Hispanics.
And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in on the propaganda push, as well. During an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, DeSantis said he’s entitled to further gerrymander his state’s congressional map because then-President Barack Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder “gerrymandered brutally across the country in this decade’s census.” That’s another lie, though Obama and Holder have advocated against gerrymandering.
In reality, Florida Republicans — who controlled their state’s most recent redistricting process — drew gerrymandered maps that DeSantis pressured them to gerrymander further with a proposal from his office that diluted Black voter power. Nonetheless, the governor portrayed Florida’s map as unfairly weighted in favor of minority groups and claimed “there’s some racial gerrymandering that’s still lingering that we have to correct, per a recent Florida Supreme Court decision.” Indeed, Florida’s Republican-packed Supreme Court ruled last month that DeSantis could move forward with his gerrymandering plan, but the court also acknowledged that the plan would diminish the power of Black voters.
All this to say, evidence abounds that Republicans are waging a racist assault on the American voting system — even as they wage a propaganda campaign to present this push as something else entirely.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
