White Rage
Page 15
The raid was the result of an eighteen-month investigation by a man who would be named by Texas’s attorney general as “Outstanding Lawman of the Year.” Attached to the federally funded Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force, based in Amarillo, about fifty miles away from Tulia, Tom Coleman didn’t lead a team of investigators; instead, he singlehandedly identified each member of this massive cocaine operation and made more than one hundred undercover drug purchases. He was hailed as a hero, and his testimony immediately led to thirty-eight of the forty-six being convicted, with the other cases just waiting to get into the clogged court system. Joe Moore, a pig farmer, was sentenced to 99 years for selling two hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine to the undercover narcotics agent. Kizzie White received twenty-five years, while her husband, William “Cash” Love, landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine.153
The case began to unravel, however, when Kizzie’s sister, Tonya, went to trial. Coleman swore that she had sold him drugs. Tonya, however, had video proof that she was at a bank in Oklahoma City, three hundred miles away, cashing a check at the very moment he claimed to have bought cocaine from her. Then another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, had timesheets and his boss’s eyewitness testimony that Wafer was at work and not out selling drugs to Coleman. And when the Outstanding Lawman of the Year swore under oath that he had purchased cocaine from Yul Bryant, a tall bushy-haired man, only to have Bryant—bald and five feet six—appear in court, it finally became very clear that something was awry.154
Coleman, in fact, had no proof whatsoever that any of the alleged drug deals had taken place. There were no audiotapes. No photographs. No witnesses. No other police officers present. No fingerprints but his on the bags of drugs. No records. Over the span of an eighteen-month investigation, he never wore a wire. He claimed to have written each drug transaction on his leg but to have washed away the evidence accidentally when he showered. Additional investigation led to no corroborating proof of his allegations, and when the police arrested those forty-six people and vigorously searched their homes and possessions, no drugs were found, nor were weapons, money, paraphernalia, or any other indications at all that the housewife, pig farmer, or anyone else arrested were actually drug kingpins.155
What was discovered, however, was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs in Tulia, Texas, with a clear racial bias. Coleman perjured himself on the stand when he claimed to be an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. In fact, he was under indictment for theft in his previous position as a deputy sheriff in another county. The prosecutor, Terry McEachern, knew about this but failed to disclose it to the defense attorneys. The district attorney also ensured that there were no African Americans on the jury in each trial. Moreover, Judge Edward Self, who presided over the lion’s share of the trials, publically expressed his support for the prosecutors and sealed Coleman’s employment records, including the charge of embezzlement as a deputy sheriff.156
The judicial malfeasance immediately took on racial undertones. Coleman, a white man who routinely referred to African Americans as “niggers,” had accused 10 percent of Tulia’s black population of dealing in cocaine.157 Based on his word alone, 50 percent of all the black men in the town were indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Of the six whites and Latinos who were arrested in the raid, all had relations—familial or friendly—with Tulia’s black community.158 Although the white community consistently denied that race played any role in this, the speed and efficiency in which the criminal justice system worked to sentence black defendants and their white and Latino friends to decades in prison, based solely on the unsubstantiated testimony of a man under indictment, suggests otherwise.159 Randy Credico of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, called Tulia “a mass lynching … Taking down 50 percent of the male black adult population like that, it’s outrageous. It’s like being accused of raping someone in Indiana in the 1930s. You didn’t do it, but it doesn’t matter because a bunch of Klansmen on the jury are going to string you up anyway.”160
But this wasn’t 1930. It was the beginning of the twenty-first century, and a powerful Civil Rights Movement had bridged those two eras. Yet now, felony convictions, chiefly via the war on drugs, replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens. Disfranchisement, permanent bans on jury service, and legal discrimination in employment, housing, and education—despite the civil rights legislation of the 1960s—are now all burdens carried by those who have been incarcerated. That burden has been disproportionately shouldered by the black community, which, although only 13 percent of the nation’s population, makes up 45 percent of those incarcerated.161
Even more disconcertingly, these felony convictions have had little to do with ensuring the safety and security of the nation and in most cases target the wrong culprits.162 Logically, given the poor state of the schools, crushing poverty, and the lack of viable living-wage options for large swaths of the black population, African Americans’ drug use should mirror their staggering incarceration rates. According to Human Rights Watch, “the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.” In Missouri, for example, African Americans make up 11.2 percent of the state’s residents but 41.2 percent of those incarcerated. In fact, “in twenty states, the percent[age] of blacks incarcerated is at least five times greater than their share of resident population.”163 But, there is no direct correlation between drug use and incarceration.
Despite all the economic and social pressures they confront, blacks have shown an amazing resilience in the face of drugs; indeed, they are among the least likely drug users of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States.164 And despite all the stereotypes, they are among the least likely to sell drugs too. As a major study out of the University of Washington revealed, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of whites’ engagement with the illegal-drug trade, law enforcement has continued to focus its efforts on the black population.165
Thus, after the Civil Rights Movement, when African Americans were making incredible strides in education, voting, and employment, those gains were a threat to the status quo of inequality. Thus, the “United States did not face a crime problem that was racialized; it faced a race problem that was criminalized.”166
Five
How to Unelect a Black President
On November 4, 2008, the United States seemed to be crossing the racial Rubicon. For a brief moment, the mirage of hope hung in the air, mesmerizing those not just in the United States but also around the world. Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory led an observer in Tehran to note, “The country that they called ‘the great Satan,’ [declaring] it the symbol of all kinds of tyranny, has enough respect for democratic values that [it has] allowed a black candidate to come this far and even become a president.” And from Moscow: “The U.S., that is a country that is really majestic … I feel it is a country where everything is possible.”1 Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu agreed. Obama’s victory, he said, told “people of color that for them, the sky is the limit.”2 CHANGE HAS COME TO AMERICA blazed the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer.3
Not everyone was ecstatic. As the Republican postmortems on the election poured in, it immediately became apparent that the voting patterns spelled trouble for the GOP. Obama had captured a significantly higher share of the white vote than John Kerry had managed to secure in the 2004 election. Moreover, 66 percent of Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, not to mention 62 percent of Asians, 56 percent of women, 66 percent of voters under thirty years of age, and 95 percent of African Americans.4 The last of these, in some ways, was to be expected. What wasn’t anticipated, however, was that for the first time in history, the black voter turnout rate nearly equaled that of whites.5
The only demographics John McCain could claim to have run away with were the elderly white and evangelical Christian vote.6 And therein lay the problem; for those sectors of
the American voting population are not growing. Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, taking stock of the nearly inevitable demographic apocalypse, put it best: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”7
This dawning of demographic extinction was all the more troubling because the largest percentage of eligible voters in forty years had cast a ballot in the 2008 election.8 It was not only a record turnout; it was one that delivered an 8.5 million vote differential in Obama’s favor, with 15 million new voters overall. “It’s a bad thing for Republicans when you drill down into all these states, and see lots of new voters, newcomers,” groaned Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review. “It’s like, where did all the Republicans go? Did they move to Utah?”9
This was no idle question either, because the surge in voters came from all across the racial and ethnic ranks—blacks, Latinos, and Asians—of which only 8 percent identified as Republican.10 While the number of whites who voted remained roughly the same as it had been in the 2004 election, two million more African Americans, two million additional Hispanics, and six hundred thousand more Asians cast their ballots in 2008.11 Even more unsettling to the GOP was the youth and relative poverty of those who had now joined the ranks of voters. Those making less than fifteen thousand dollars a year nearly doubled their turnout to the polls, going from 18 percent in 2004 to 34 percent in 2008. And naturally these new voters had a policy agenda that favored a greater role for government in making education affordable and accessible, using the might of the federal government to institute a program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and raising the minimum wage to begin to put in place elements that could increase the quality of life for millions of Americans.12
The ardent supporters of McCain were simply not, as census projections soon enough confirmed, on the demographic ascendant. As a consequence, they were on the verge of losing both their electoral clout and the ability to control key public offices that could maintain the status quo.13 Meanwhile, first-time voters cast almost 69 percent of their ballots for Obama. While that reality could have—or more to the point should have—signaled an opportunity for the GOP to reexamine its platform, the sclerotic hardening of the “conservative” notions that moved the Republican Party from centrist right to right-wing made it increasingly difficult if not impossible to adapt the GOP’s policies to address the overriding concerns of this wave of newly engaged voters.14 One party official, while offering assurances that racism wasn’t the driving motivation, admitted, “It’s simply that the Republican Party gave up a long time ago ever believing that anything they did would get minorities to vote for them.”15 Trapped between a demographically declining support base and an ideological straitjacket that made the party not only unresponsive but also unpalatable to millions of Americans, the GOP reached for a tried and true weapon: disfranchisement.
Once it became clear that the voter turnout rate of blacks had nearly equaled that of whites, as Penda Hair of the progressive Advancement Project has noted, “Conservatives were looking at it and saying ‘We’ve got to clamp things down.’ They’d always tried to suppress the black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”16 Those efforts hid the anger and determination behind a legitimate-sounding, noteworthy concern: protecting the integrity of the ballot box from voter fraud. Still, Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and the founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was explicit early on: “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said, noting that the GOP’s “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”17 But with fifteen million new voters already and with African Americans exercising their citizenship rights at rates virtually equal to whites, something had to be done. That is where ALEC stepped in to draft “model voter-ID legislation … that … popped up in very similar form in states like Pennsylvania and Texas and Wisconsin.”18 These laws require, among other things, particular types of identification that—properly and mercilessly applied—make it difficult for African Americans and others to vote.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former George W. Bush appointee to the Federal Election Commission and one of the primary catalysts behind the new intensified wave of voter suppression, actually took umbrage that anyone would call the nationwide efforts to crack down on supposed irregularities at the polls a “restoration of Jim Crow.”19 Just as African Americans’ so-called genetically induced moral and intellectual failings provided the rationale for Jim Crow, the GOP created a similar series of hypotheses to rationalize voter suppression. The Southern Strategy’s long-term efforts to link the Democratic Party with blacks and to make African American synonymous with crime, thus made tying Democrats to widespread fraud a simple, logical leap. “Corruption, election fraud, and Democrats,” one man noted, “they went hand-in-hand-in-hand.”20
Obama’s victory, by this line of interpretation, was not the result of a brilliant strategy, that had already outmaneuvered the Clinton juggernaut by energizing the youth and the poor to believe that they had an actual stake in America, but rather the sordid outcome of a brazenly stolen election tied directly to all those new voters. Key to this charge was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a community-based group that had launched extensive voter registration drives throughout the country. Even before the first vote was cast, McCain accused ACORN of “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”21 By the time the election was over, as Newsweek’s Katie Connolly reported, “a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally [thought] that ACORN stole the presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”22
ACORN was many things, but a well-oiled machine able to pull off nationwide voter fraud was not one of them. In this case, it was terribly sloppy, lacking either rigorous oversight or a check-and-balance system for those the organization had hired. ACORN had in its ranks several employees who, wanting a paycheck but not willing to do the hard work of registering voters, chose the path of least effort and faked voter registration cards. The law nonetheless requires that all cards be submitted to local election officials, which meant that even those obviously bogus ones could not be thrown in the trash. Hence, Mickey Mouse apparently wanted to vote, as did Jive Turkey. This debacle was tailor-made to fuel the narrative of widespread voter ID fraud. Stoking the flames further yet was Obama’s previous work, years earlier, with an affiliate of ACORN.23
Oddly enough, ACORN had already been investigated extensively by the George W. Bush administration, which had pressured U.S. attorneys to find evidence of fraud. No matter how hard they tried, though, they simply couldn’t. And when some of the attorneys in the Department of Justice refused to throw suspicion on Democratic candidates by filing half-baked or trumped-up charges of voter registration fraud, especially before an election, they were summarily fired.24
There have been proven instances of vote fraud in the past, but those cases involved election officials’ wrongdoing or the manipulation of absentee ballots. The kind of voter registration fraud that seized the imagination of GOP activists, on the other hand, which is based on stealing someone’s identity or creating a fake persona to cast a ballot, thus altering the results of an election, is in fact very rare. The convoluted scheme is not used because “it is an exceedingly dumb strategy.”25 To have real impact would require an improbable conspiracy involving millions of people. Robert Brandon, president of the Fair Elections Legal Network, notes, “You can’t steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D.s won’t stop that.”26
Protecting the integrity of the ballot box, however, is not nor has it ever been the issue. Rather, the goal has been to intimidate and harass key populations to keep them away from the polls. It is a bit more sophisticated than in the days of Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo’s 1946 call to arms to get a rope and a match to keep blac
ks away from the voting booth, but the intent is the same.27
Over time, disfranchisement has become more subtle, more palatable, and more sophisticated. In 1962, while in Arizona, William Rehnquist, who was subsequently appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court and, under Ronald Reagan, elevated to chief justice, had begun to perfect new methods of voter intimidation—elements of which gained widespread usage in the twenty-first century. First, Rehnquist’s group of Republican stalwarts sent “do not forward” mail to residents in Democratic strongholds. Then, based on the faulty premise that returned cards meant the person was no longer in the district, on Election Day his troops questioned the legitimacy of the voter based on nothing more substantial than returned mail, and demanded that the mostly black and Hispanic population prove that they could read and write by interpreting portions of the Constitution.28
Obama’s election sent similar efforts into overdrive. The pillorying of ACORN, in particular, allowed the fearful specter of voter fraud to be raised, leading to a bevy of “protect the ballot box” initiatives. In Wisconsin, for instance, a rigorous voter ID law was passed in the wake of charges of rampant fraud at the polls. But in a state with more than 3.4 million registered voters, the 10 to 12 people convicted of voter fraud each year were usually ex-felons, who simply sought to cast a ballot before their voting rights had been restored.29 Even the Bush campaign’s concerted drive to find rampant voter fraud throughout the nation uncovered that out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, all of 26 convictions or guilty pleas were registered—roughly .00000013 percent of the tallied ballots.30
Each restriction and requirement crafted and pushed through Republican-dominated state legislatures and signed off by Republican governors was carefully aimed at the population of voters who had helped put a black man in the White House. The goal, as one Mitt Romney supporter expressed in 2012, was to “Put the White Back in the White House.”31 And those efforts turned poor whites, students, and the elderly into collateral damage that got caught in the blowback.