In one of last week’s columns, I made a statement that generated some feedback. Specifically, I said that modern victimhood culture leads to the end of civilization because its proponents blow up the rules by which civilization is agreed upon. Without dragging readers through that previous argument again, let me explain the point simply: people whose primary goal is to achieve their own victimhood will act in highly destructive and irrational ways—or at least irrational in any other respect beyond achieving victim status.
An example I gave was a video of an Antifa agitator in Portland berating an ICE officer and then spitting on him. The predictable result followed: the Antifa participant was promptly and roughly arrested. That was the outcome he sought. The rough arrest made him a victim, and if the video was edited just right, the officers would be portrayed as thugs. Victimhood culture is poison. It’s very, very bad stuff.
Eventually, the infrastructure on which victimhood culture depends frays and then tears. This is, of course, the aim of victimhood culture itself, and then the so-called “victims” almost immediately morph into the aggressors. But this happens in only one scenario. In another, the people accused as victimizers simply stop caring about the accusation.
As I noted before, the practitioners of this grift in the modern political arena are riding on the coattails of the Civil Rights movement, which used nonviolent means to highlight the victimization of the black community by racist Southern society. Those methods were originally adopted from the nonviolent struggle led by Mohandas Gandhi during India’s independence movement against British rule.
Gandhi himself, when asked whether his methods would be successful under varying circumstances, unequivocally stated the answer was no. Specifically, he said that if it had been Nazi Germany rather than the British Empire holding India under its boot, nonviolent methods would have been suicidal.
It takes a moral society to redress victimhood. Any other society would be thoroughly unmoved. And that’s true when the victimhood is real. When it’s fake and contrived—which is the case with modern practitioners of victimhood culture—even a moral society is within its bounds to reject it.
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I bring this up because of something both incomprehensible and illuminating. Specifically: Ketanji Brown Jackson is the Supreme Court’s chief practitioner of victimhood culture.
In fact, her entire existence on the Court is a function of victimhood. She was, after all, nominated by President Joe Biden expressly because she is Black and female—two immutable characteristics to which Biden limited his pool of nominees. Limiting a pool of applicants to only a specific race is the very essence of racism and the antithesis of meritocracy, which was the basis under which America adopted the narrative of the Civil Rights movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. captured the nation’s imagination in his famous 1963 Washington Mall speech when he asked that we not judge by the color of skin but by the content of character. And some 60-odd years later, Charlie Kirk was castigated as a racist for applying King’s formula to Jackson’s confirmation on the Supreme Court and finding it wanting.
That’s what victimhood culture has done.
Almost nobody seems satisfied with Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Court. I’m not sure how satisfied Black people are. A couple of my Black friends—one of whom is a Democrat (I’m working on her)—cannot stop expressing how embarrassing Jackson is, based on the ill-considered things she says even within the ambit of her job on the Court.
Biden’s everlasting shame in this case (among many others) is that by saddling the Black community with Jackson—who is far and away the dumbest and least analytical justice in the building and lacks respect even from the other two leftists on the Court—he sentenced them to long-lasting embarrassment.
But the criteria that unjustly elevated her beyond her capabilities also apply to Congress and how its districts are drawn, which makes it unsurprising that Jackson would resort to the weak arguments she does in defense of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the central statute at issue in the Louisiana v. Callais case the Court heard oral arguments for last Wednesday.
Because Black victimhood in the Jim Crow South all those years ago must apparently be served forever, according to Ketanji Brown Jackson and the current luminaries of the so-called “civil rights” movement.
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The civil rights in question apparently include the right to win elections.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the legal lodestar that creates a necessity for affirmative action/DEI congressional districts for Black Democrat politicians. I phrase it that way because there are so many Black politicians who have been able to win elections for major political offices in majority-white districts that it’s utterly unremarkable when one wins a statewide office or a seat in a majority-white district.
Ilhan Omar getting elected in a 70 percent white congressional district completely debunks any notion that white voters won’t support Black politicians. If you’ll vote for Omar, to say that you aren’t bigoted against Black people is just about the kindest thing I can say about you.
Many of those same people elected Keith Ellison to Congress and then made him Minnesota’s attorney general—as Daniel Cameron was elected Kentucky’s attorney general as a Republican. Mark Robinson (North Carolina) and Winsome Earle-Sears (Virginia) were elected lieutenant governors in Southern states. Robinson ran and lost for governor, while Earle-Sears could well win her race for that position this year—as could Congressman Byron Donalds in Florida next year.
Tim Scott is already a U.S. senator from South Carolina.
I could list many more successful Black candidates who have won over majority-white constituencies.
The idea that Black politicians must have Black districts in order to be successful is utter bunkum. It is forwarded by people whose “disability,” to use Jackson’s term, is ideological rather than racial.
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The Callais case arises from a lawsuit filed by white voters against the state of Louisiana for drawing a majority-Black congressional district under pressure from an Obama-appointed federal judge in Baton Rouge.
The suit alleged that the racially gerrymandered Sixth Congressional District—a Rorschach-test monstrosity stretching from Baton Rouge northwest to Shreveport—violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Both the Western District of Louisiana and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
The current officeholder in that district, an omnipresent political cat named Cleo Fields—widely regarded as a joke by virtually everyone in Louisiana outside of his hardcore supporters—argued as the case wound its way to Washington that Jackson would echo.
Fields asked: “How many Blacks have Louisiana elected to Congress from a majority-white district?” The answer is zero. “Without the Voting Rights Act, people of color don’t have an opportunity to participate in the process,” he claimed.
I asked in response what Fields has done to make himself marketable to white voters. I have not received an answer.
The reason is that there is no answer to be had. Fields’ entire political career fits inside a petri dish of Black victimhood and grievance and depends on assuaging that grievance with goodies from the public trough—like a ready-made congressional seat, which Fields has had drawn for him not once but twice.
If the Callais case results in a redrawn Louisiana congressional map, it will be the second time his district has been struck down for racial gerrymandering. The first was in the early 1990s.
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If Callais goes the way it appeared it might, based on Wednesday’s oral arguments and the justices’ reactions, then a goodly number of sad Cleo Fieldses—and Hank Johnsons, Bennie Thompsons, Frederica Wilsons, and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus representing electric-blue, majority-Black districts in red states—will face serious challenges.
Those Republican Southern states forced to carve out DEI districts to pay for the sins of ancient and long-dead Democrats won’t continue honoring this fraudulent victimhood. Their legislators will go to work redrawing maps to introduce merit as a metric of success where victimization currently rests.
Does that mean fewer members of the Congressional Black Caucus? Sure, maybe.
Does it mean the character of successful Black politicians will necessarily change? Absolutely.
We would likely see more Harold Fords and fewer Sheila Jackson Lees.
That would be of great benefit not just to America as a whole, but to the Black community. Maybe even to the Democrat Party—though that isn’t a consideration any of us should spend much time contemplating.
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Callais isn’t decided yet, so this is all speculative—aspirational. But after Wednesday’s oral arguments in the case, what’s clear is this: victimhood is a very poor substitute for merit. And now, there is an opportunity to free ourselves from one major manifestation of that substitution.
https://spectator.org/racism-victimhood-and-louisiana-v-callais/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=racism-victimhood-and-louisiana-v-callais