Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  Guinier was concerned with the impact that the concepts “one man one vote” and “winner take all” voting were having on the political representation of people of color. Unless minorities in an area were especially politically aligned with the majority in the population, they were never going to have elected representatives that actually represented their needs. If a candidate needed more than 50 percent of the votes to win, then it would almost never be a good idea for the candidate to prioritize the needs of a minority group when that group’s numbers would not give the candidate enough votes to achieve victory. In winner-take-all elections, an elected official can represent 51 percent of their electorate and not represent 49 percent of their electorate, and it would still be considered a representative democracy. Further, because there are often only two choices in systems of simple majority rule, each candidate is forced to establish positions as far away as possible from their opponent’s views on select hot-button issues to ensure that they don’t lose undecided voters to the other side.

  In these scenarios, especially when the victors get to redraw electoral districts to further marginalize minorities, minority groups remain voiceless. This is beyond theory; the overwhelming white maleness of our elected government is testament to how this plays out.

  As a possible solution, Guinier proposed a system of “cumulative voting.” It is not a new system and is practiced successfully in countries all over the world, as well as in multiple cities and counties across the United States. Cumulative voting is a way to increase minority representation by pooling multiple votes across a larger group of candidates and allocating seats based on the pooled votes.

  To nerd out a bit here, let’s see a breakdown of how it might work.

  Instead of having one small representative district that would give you two final choices to vote on, districts would be combined into much larger districts, and each voter would get a set number of votes. If your larger district has six candidates for three open positions, you might have six votes.

  Now, you can do whatever you want with those six votes. Do you feel strongly about one candidate, and are you convinced that if your community banded together, you’d have enough votes to put the candidate in the top three? You may want to put all six of your votes toward that one candidate and try to convince your community members to do the same. Do you really love one candidate, but you know that there’s a second candidate you’d be pretty happy with if your first pick doesn’t have enough votes? You may want to give your first pick four votes and your second pick two. At the end of the election, the top three vote-getters win.

  Instead of an election where you are likely to have large minorities of the population who are the ideological opposite of their representatives, you may have one representative that the majority liked enough to put into office, and another that was able to build a broad enough coalition among minority groups to come in second or third. This would increase the number of people who feel represented by their government. When I say “minorities” I don’t just mean racial minorities. This voting process would ensure greater representation for people of all races who feel like their voices haven’t been heard because their needs or values differ from the majority’s. In addition, it would be less conducive to the extreme division of current two-party politics, because instead of an alternative third candidate spelling potential doom for the candidate they are closer ideologically to, they are instead a viable third option that can secure enough votes from a wider geographic area while not stealing votes from main candidates. Candidates would be rewarded for building coalitions, instead of punished for it, and extreme candidates who aim to “fire up the base” would have a harder time holding voters hostage over hot-button issues when voters know that they have the option to support other viable candidates that are not their opposite ideologically.

  Although this system would create a markedly different political environment than we have now, it is not a quota system, it is not “South Africa,” and it is still very democratic.

  Guinier advocated consideration of these systems as a law scholar and professor, but she had not advocated for implementing such changes in her role as a member of the Justice Department, nor would she have had the power to make such a monumental change. Guinier tried to explain cumulative voting to the press and also tried to assure people that she had no intention or ability to change the US electoral process as an assistant attorney general, but nothing she said mattered.

  “‘Quota Queen’ made any further communications superfluous,” Guinier later explained on C-SPAN. “It announced my agenda loud and clear as a Black woman who did not know her place. I would do to whites what centuries of whites had done to Blacks.”23

  Republicans, Independents, and even some Democrats began to ask Clinton to withdraw Guinier’s nomination.

  Whereas President George H. W. Bush, who had nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, remained a stalwart supporter of Thomas against serious sexual harassment charges, in the face of the rising backlash Clinton didn’t seem very inclined to defend Guinier when she dared to try to address the suppression of minority voters. His first response to the controversy was a tepid dismissal. “The Senate ought to be able to put up with a little controversy for the cause of civil rights,” Clinton told reporters in May.24 As the backlash continued and Guinier was further caricatured into the image of a white-hating Black supremacist, Clinton remained mostly silent.

  Clinton’s camp began to pressure Guinier to withdraw her name from consideration, but she refused. Guinier tried to meet with Clinton to discuss the nomination and the controversy, but he wouldn’t even extend to her the basic respect of a meeting. He did not speak with her personally until right before he announced that he was withdrawing her nomination. Guinier had tried to convince Clinton that she should at least have the chance to be heard before the Senate Judiciary Committee to give them a chance to decide for themselves on her nomination, but he had refused. Black women weren’t worth that much trouble.

  On June 3, 1993, Clinton announced that he was withdrawing Guinier’s nomination. Even though the two had been friends since they had met at law school, and even though Clinton had been specifically warned about Guinier’s “controversial” writing on the electoral process, Clinton claimed that he had not read Guinier’s writing until shortly before then, which makes him either dangerously forgetful, wildly irresponsible, or a liar—you choose. Clinton said that once he read Guinier’s writing, he found within them “ideas which I myself cannot embrace,” and added, “Had I read them before I nominated her, I would not have done so.”25

  Guinier’s nomination was over, and so was her long-standing friendship with the Clintons, who would never attempt to repair the severed relationship. When interviewed years later about the nomination and her feelings about Bill Clinton, Guinier was generous but honest. “I respect him. I admire him. But I don’t think I want to be in his company—not without some prior conversations.”26

  Guinier went on to a prestigious teaching career at Harvard. In 2018, Harvard held a symposium to honor Guinier’s contributions to the university and to the field of law. “She has done nothing short of change the way we think about law,” said Harvard Law School dean John Manning. “And she’s made us rethink the fundamental connection between race and the distribution of political power in our system. She’s been a great scholar, a great teacher, and an unfailingly generous colleague.”27

  Columbia Law School professor and Harvard Law alum Patricia Williams spoke of the time, fifteen years earlier, when she had watched her colleague endure widespread anger and accusations for words that she didn’t say: “I remember seeing her on TV, her lips were moving but you never heard her voice. People were speaking over it, talking about how dangerous she was and saying what she was [allegedly] saying—but never saying what she really represented. I thought about this again when I saw Elizabeth Warren being silenced. It showed that honor for some can mean the silencing of others.”28
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br />   OCASIO-CORTEZ, PRESSLEY, TLAIB, AND OMAR: THE MOST DANGEROUS WOMEN IN CONGRESS

  So far we have not seen that Speaker Pelosi will exercise any kind of control, or that she knows how to exercise control over these socialists.

  —Republican Representative Liz Cheney29

  In the fall of 2019 I was speaking at a conference in Idaho that celebrated racial and ethnic diversity in the fight to end violence against women. Attendees were mostly women, and I would guess that about 20 percent of them were women of color. Considering that Idaho itself is 91 percent white, this was a pretty diverse crowd. The speech I gave was about how to decenter whiteness in our racial justice efforts. After my speech, I led a workshop on the same topic.

  When the workshop broke out into group activity, I sat at an empty table to prepare for the next segment in the session. As I sat, quietly writing in my notepad, I was approached by a white male attendee. He did not ask if it was a good time to approach me; he did not seem to care that I was obviously working. He just sat next to me and said, “Oh good, now I can talk to you. I have a question.”

  The man did not wait for my consent to the conversation. He just dove in. He described a few of the political activism groups he’s involved in, mostly around environmentalism. He goes to fundraisers and events, he attends meet-up groups and protests. He was going to a fundraiser dinner for environmental causes that very evening. It was, he described, going to be a fancy event, requiring cocktail dress. And he was sure that, just like every other event he had attended, it would be populated exclusively with white people. He would love to see more people of color at these events, he said, but they were nowhere to be found.

  “Why,” he asked me in conclusion, “don’t people of color care more about important political issues?”

  Many white men see a political landscape dominated by white men and think it is that way because white men are just more politically minded. They think that the absence of women and people of color from powerful rooms is due to self-selection. They do not question how unwelcoming the room they have built might be. They do not question whether or not the discussions they are having in that room are inclusive and generate productive discussions for women and people of color. They don’t ask if there are other, equally important conversations happening in other rooms. And they don’t even bother to ask if anyone unlocked the door. They look at the room and say that women and people of color aren’t in it because women and people of color aren’t interested. Then they cite this supposed disinterest as proof that women and people of color are too unqualified to even be invited in.

  I tried to raise the possibility that maybe a room full of white people in one of the whitest states in the country was not the most welcoming to people of color. I tried to assure him not only that people of color cared about the environment, but that Indigenous people actually invented the environmentalism he was claiming as his own. But he didn’t want to hear me. He finally shook his head and said, “Well, we don’t have to agree on all that.”

  As he walked away and I went back to teaching the class, I couldn’t help but imagine how this man would react if the people of color who had long been fighting to protect the environment and protect people of color from the devastating environmental impacts of white supremacist capitalism were to just show up at his next environmental club meeting. I don’t think he’d love it as much as he claims.

  While we like to give lip service to the diversity and open opportunity of our political process, the truth is that much of white America completely ignores the political lives of people of color—especially women of color. We are often seen as a reliably Democratic voting bloc, to be pulled out each election cycle to vote for a mediocre white Democratic candidate and then put back in storage until the next election. At least that’s how white Democrats see us. Many white Republicans also see us as a reliably Democratic voting bloc, to be prevented from exercising our right to vote at all costs. Sure, one is worse than the other, but both are pretty shitty.

  Both the white right and the white left often like to assume that our issues are just “our issues,” and that we may address them in our own little groups, but they have no place on the national stage. Any candidate of color who makes it to national politics will of course have to leave their racial identity behind in order to truly represent “real” America. And there is no way that a woman of color who insists on fully representing her community and her values would ever be able to garner enough votes to win any major election.

  That has long been the case. And for many years, women of color who tried to lead with truly progressive values and refused to leave the issues facing their community behind did not often win elections. Over the years, merely existing as a self-proclaimed progressive white man was considered more than enough qualification to win votes. It has caused many of those white men to become lazy in their politics and in their connection with their constituents.

  Then a small handful of women of color took the House of Representatives, and the nation, by storm.

  Few people outside of her most ardent supporters expected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a twenty-eight-year-old Democratic Socialist and first-time candidate, to defeat long-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for a seat representing New York’s Fourteenth District. Ocasio-Cortez herself was so surprised that the moment she found out she had won her primary became television history: CNN cameras caught her staring, eyes wide, at a television screen, reading the poll results for the first time. “I won!” she shrieked and then clapped her hand over her mouth in amazement.

  But perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that Ocasio-Cortez was able to defeat Crowley, who was phoning it in at best. He assumed he was unbeatable. The fourth-ranking Democrat in Congress, Crowley had not faced a primary opponent in fourteen years. He had been comfortably reelected time and time again by an aging group of regular local voters who could be counted on during a primary even when nobody was running for president.

  Crowley’s seeming inability to consider Ocasio-Cortez as a serious competitor didn’t seem to faze her. When he was a no-show to their first scheduled debate, she gamely debated an empty chair. When he skipped yet another debate, sending a representative in his place, even the New York Times began to wonder if he had stopped taking his role as a US congressional representative seriously.30

  So, by knocking on doors and actually talking to people about the issues they were facing, Ocasio-Cortez was able to energize voters in a way that establishment candidates had not been able to. She decided to invest her time and energy in the voters that she thought Crowley had avoided, especially younger voters and voters from immigrant communities. Half the residents of District Fourteen were born outside the United States, and 70 percent were people of color.31 She focused on issues that she felt connected with left-leaning younger voters in 2018: jobs, tuition-free education, the environment. Ocasio-Cortez introduced herself to people who had never had a congressional candidate knock on their door before, and she encouraged them to register as Democrats so they could vote in the primary.

  “When people feel like they are being spoken directly to,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN Newsroom, “I do feel like… they’ll do things like turn out in an off-year, mid-year primary.”32

  When Ilhan Omar, a thirty-three-year-old Somali American Muslim woman who had immigrated to the United States from the war-torn country as a child, ran to represent the constituents of Minnesota’s Fifth District, many people outside her local area didn’t think she stood a chance. But Omar’s election should have been even less of a surprise than AOC’s. She was not new to Minnesota politics or to the local community, having moved there in her youth and having served as a representative in state government. Omar had already proved that she could win elections by speaking to the people that Minnesota had left behind, and unfortunately that was a lot of people. Minnesota has one of the country’s worst income and wealth disparities along racial lines in the country, and 115,000 people i
n Omar’s district—the majority of them people of color—lived at or below the poverty line.33

  Omar quickly became known for her ability to connect with voters, regardless of age, class, or race. Some expected Omar to coast on her membership in the area’s largest minority community (Minnesota has the largest number of Somali Americans in the country), but she spent time sitting face to face with as many constituents from across the district as she could. Omar talked about issues facing working-class voters, communities of color, young people, single mothers. She used her experience of being a multiple minority, a Muslim Black woman, to connect to a wide variety of Minnesotans who had been marginalized.

  At a time when Trump had made it his personal mission to target Muslims and people of color as terrorists and thugs, Omar’s efforts to build a broad progressive-values-based coalition paid off. She won her election with the highest percentage of votes of any woman in the history of the US House of Representatives, and the third-highest percentage of votes of any congressional candidate from Minnesota.34

  The 2018 election also saw victory for Palestinian American and Detroit native Rashida Tlaib. Like Omar, her election should not have come as such a surprise; she was well known and respected in her prior role as a state representative, regarded as someone who would vigorously fight for Detroit. She was a thorn in the side of big businesses that tried to exploit or neglect Detroit neighborhoods and an even bigger thorn in the side of Donald Trump. When Tlaib won her bid for Congress, representing Michigan’s Thirteenth District, she became the first Palestinian American to sit in Congress. She and Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

  Ayanna Pressley had already made headlines in 2009 when she became the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council. But outside the city, broader support for her congressional run was certainly not guaranteed. Boston has a long history of racism and racial segregation, especially in politics. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley took on a long-term incumbent. Michael Capuano, her opponent, had served ten terms in Congress. Pressley and Capuano were more aligned in ideology than Ocasio-Cortez and Crowley had been, making the likelihood that the young politician would be able to unseat the well-liked Capuano even smaller. Instead of confining her efforts to the city, where voters would be more inclined toward her, Pressley launched a broad campaign that focused on the entire district, reaching out to constituents of all races and ethnicities. Pressley’s fresh energy, perfectly encapsulated in her campaign slogan “Change can’t wait,” struck a strong chord with voters, who handed Pressley a surprising double-digit primary victory, guaranteeing her election success. With no Republican challenger, Pressley became the first Black woman to represent the state of Massachusetts in Congress.