Point Austin: 'Embrace What Is Right'

It didn't hit me until Aretha began to sing.

Until then, I was fairly impervious to the inaugural hoopla, having so long anticipated this hour that it seemed old news by the time it finally arrived. Watching the endless preliminaries on the office TV, we were teasing one another, muttering about Bush (and the odious Rick Warren), wincing at the inevitably lame TV commentators, and pretending to spot absent, lucky friends ("there's Dunbar!") amidst the enormous, unending throng.

Then Aretha, topped with that spectacular Sunday hat, began, "My country, 'tis of thee," her voice, as it always does, carrying the cultural history of the last 50 years. It suddenly and overwhelmingly struck me what an extraordinary history it has been – "sweet land of liberty" – culminating for the astonishing moment in the ascension of a still young African-American man to the presidency of the United States. As nearly everybody said, it was not something we imagined possible 50 years ago or when Aretha Franklin was still a little girl, singing in the choir of a Detroit congregation.

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Let Freedom Ring!

In the wake of that epiphany, most of the speeches seemed anticlimactic, including the new president's dutiful paean to work and responsibility (hey, it wasn't us slackers that got us into this mess). At least he and John Roberts, the Harvard Law School stars, managed jointly to screw up the presidential oath, nicely denting their mutual reputations for perfection. I was most surprisingly taken by the benediction by civil rights warhorse Joseph Lowery, who declined to answer the general call to tightly wrapped formality, instead closing the ceremonies on a reassuringly colloquial note. He called on the Lord, all right, but his prayer was aimed more precisely at the lingering historical distinctions among the multitude. "Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning," the Rev. Lowery prayed, "we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back; when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right."

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Just a Memory

Lowery's folksy prayer is doubly important in the aftermath of the inauguration, as the usual cabal of conservative commentators has predictably begun braying that Obama's election means that racism is no longer a serious national problem and we can all proceed to more important matters, such as waging war and cutting taxes. George Will joined the chorus on Sunday, taking up the Austin-based Voting Rights Act lawsuit I wrote about here last week (Jan. 16) and declaring, with longtime VRA foes Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, that "Obama's election demonstrates that another facet of the Voting Rights Act has lost its original, and even then spurious, rationale." Stymied by a virtually unanimous 2006 congres­sional extension of the VRA, Will has to resort to claiming that it was "based on the evidence used for the 1975 extension" – when in actual fact, there was plenty of dismal evidence from the current decade that various forms of voter suppression (including the race-bound Texas re-redistricting) remain in use, especially in the regions covered by Section 5 of the VRA.

Will and his familiars refuse to acknowledge that the Voting Rights Act has in fact never been about candidates but about voters – and in the absence of legal inhibitions, the WFIC (white folks in charge) will return to their historical practices of suppressing the minority vote by any means possible.

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Premature Celebration

Which brings us by degrees to the Texas Senate and the recent demise of the "two-thirds rule," the gentlemen's agreement whereby no substantive bill could reach the floor without the support of two-thirds of the senators. To be frank, only sanctimony or hypocrisy allows any self-respecting reporter to mourn entirely the loss of the rule, as it effectively turns the Senate into a ritualized oratorical exercise, as most of the unreportable "debate" happens offstage, before legislation ever reaches the Senate floor. That official privacy will in fact mostly continue; what's significant about this particular change is that it was done for the purposes of voter-ID laws, a coordinated national GOP effort to pretend that there is a (heretofore invisible) wave of fraudulent voters who will be bureaucratically foiled by requiring photo IDs at the polls. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst put it bluntly enough: "Everybody wants to make sure that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections."

Since it's demonstrably false that undocumented immigrants – who reflexively avoid official interactions – vote in any substantive numbers, the voter-ID bills are inevitably symbolic pitches at the nativist Republican base, routinely determined that the relentless attempts by Mexicans and Muslims to take over the country must be stopped. The GOP leadership, looking glumly at the Texas demographics and dreading the inevitable outcome of the 2010 census – when we officially become a majority-minority state – has thus decided to stand its ground with the Anglo minority and against the growing legions of young minority voters. If they can't stop the waves from crashing on the shore, perhaps they can keep as many as possible from exercising their voting rights.

In short, when Will complains that "the civil rights impulse has decayed into coarse political entrepreneurship, exploiting today's racial spoils system," he neglects to add that he had long declined to complain as long as the right people retained the spoils. Now that other folks are finally standing at the table, he's suddenly worried that there might not be enough to go around. The election of Barack Obama means a great many things – but it hardly means it's time to declare that the battle for racial justice has been won.