The Washington Post - 29.08.2019

(Joyce) #1

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21


BY A.T. MCWILLIAMS


T


he 400th anniversary of slavery
in the United States coincides
with a Democratic presidential
primary in which reparations
for slavery have played a surprisingly
prominent role. Marianne Williamson
proposed providing u p to $500 b illion in
repayment to black Americans, while
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has reinter-
preted reparations through “baby
bonds” a nd a proposed measure to study
the effects of slavery.
Though reparations may not be
broadly popular, their economic value is
undeniable. Closing the racial wealth
gap s tands t o stimulate an e ntire nation,
adding an estimated $1.5 trillion to the
U.S. economy.
To d o that, though, we need to reckon
not just with the value of the unpaid
labor performed by generations of
slaves but also with the impact of land
thefts that cost freed slaves the most
important asset they acquired in the
years following emancipation. It m ay b e
challenging to calculate what a cotton-
picker’s wages might have been in the
absence of a free labor economy and
how those wages might have grown into
wealth over generations. But we have
always assessed the value of land in
blunt terms. Reparations for land thefts
wouldn’t just put a stark number on
what was stolen from black Americans,
it would force us to reckon with the idea
that the Emancipation Proclamation
does not represent a clear dividing line
between one era of American history
and the next.
The concrete case for reparations be-
gins with individual s tories — stories like
that of my great-great-grandparents,
Elias Charles and Luisa Wingate, and
kept alive by people such as my 84-year-
old grandmother, Wanda Crow.
Elias, whom Wanda j oyfully d escribes
as “a handsome and deeply dark-
skinned man,” was born just three years
before the Emancipation Proclamation
was signed. In his twenties, Elias moved
from Darlington, S.C., to Gurdon, Ark.
Bent on reaping the benefits of their
freedom, Elias and his wife, Luisa, ar-
rived i n Arkansas, founded a church a nd
purchased more than 150 acres of land.
They weren’t alone in this specific
pursuit of the American Dream. By 1910,
the peak of black land ownership in
U.S. history, black people owned 15 mil-
lion acres of land. But their holdings
fell nearly 85 percent, to 2.3 million
acres, by the late 1990s. Much of this
decline did not happen by accident.
In my grandmother’s telling, Elias’s
untimely passing left Luisa to look after
the land they’d purchased, now home to
chickens, cows and other farm animals.
To contain them, Luisa bought barbed
wire from a local white family and
agreed to pay off her purchase over t ime.
But after missing one payment, which
my grandmother recalls as “less than
$50,” the white family swiftly seized her

only asset: the land — roughly 150 acres,
taken over a meager bushel of wire.
My family believes that Luisa, a black
woman navigating the South mere dec-
ades after slavery’s end, was illiterate —
as was the case for 80 percent of non-
white people in the late 1800s. It is also
unlikely that she had access to a lawyer,
or that she could place her faith in the
Jim Crow law enforcement. Luisa was,
like many black families of her time,
defenseless. And, as a result, she was left
devoid of assets — and hope. Soon after,
my great-great-grandmother Luisa
moved t o Detroit i n search of w ork a nd a
new life.
It’s i mpossible t o go b ack n ow to verify
this account with certainty. Many black
people’s stories of coercively seized land
resemble my family’s: They are pre-
served in oral tradition but not formally
documented. Though these incidents
were deplorable, says Mary Frances
Berry, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, they were common, as
were tactics such as the o nes t hat robbed
my family of our land.
The consequences of such thefts rip-
ple through generations. According to a
2015 report, land in Arkansas today is
worth roughly $6,739 per acre, valuing
the approximately 150 acres my family
lost at more than $1 million. The loss of
that land dramatically shifted our fam-
ily’s financial trajectory across genera-
tions. Even if Luisa and her descendants
had not been able to farm it successfully,
if the family had been able to hold on to
the land and sell it at a fair price, that
asset c ould have l aid the f oundation for a
very different future.
We are not alone. Though the issue of
land loss has recently returned to public
attention, this part of our history has
been well reported and understood for
years. In 2001, the Associated Press pub-
lished a thorough investigation into the
heinous loss of land experienced by
black f amilies l ike mine. Interviews w ith
406 victims whose families lost 24,000
acres of land worth tens of millions of
dollars unearthed harrowing stories of
pilfered properties. Some thefts were
accomplished by legal subterfuge, o thers
through lynching. Lost l and c ontinues t o
be the driving factor of A merica’s b illion-
dollar debt to black people. The result of
that debt means that the average black
family would need 228 years to amass
the wealth of an average white family.
So to the presidential candidates who
have expressed support for reparations
but failed to share concrete proposals,
what is your s trategy to repay b lack s lave
descendants? Your future constituents
deserve to know. And when the complex
but solvable question of “how” inevita-
bly deters your action, think first of
families such as mine — families whose
ancestors lost millions a short century
ago, and have been distanced from the
American Dream as a result.

A.T. M cWilliams is a writer and poet based in
Oakland, Calif.

My ancestors’ case


for reparations


BY ANNA CLARK


T


he Great Lakes — five inland seas
holding one-fifth of all the fresh
water on Earth — are vast, but
they are not limitless. So it is
alarming that Wisconsin intends to send
water out of the basin not because public
health demands it but because a private
company wants it. This cuts against the
understanding of the lakes as a public
trust and, in an era of nationwide water
insecurity, sets a dangerous precedent.
Foxconn Te chnology Group, a Ta iwan-
ese electronics manufacturer, is building
a plant to make LCD screens in Mount
Pleasant, Wis. The state that landed Fox-
conn with environmental waivers and
about $4 billion in incentives decided
that it was fine for it to have Great Lakes
water, too. In 2018, Wisconsin granted a
permit for Racine and Foxconn to use
7 million gallons a day from Lake Michi-
gan, taking it outside the area where
water naturally returns to the Great Lakes
watershed.
The diversion sidesteps a key piece of
water policy that is commonly called the
Great Lakes Compact. The compact,
along with Ontario and Quebec’s parallel
agreement, is a protocol for when water
can be taken outside the basin — which is
to say, almost never. But there are excep-
tions for cities and counties that straddle
the watershed boundary. With its ground-
water contaminated by naturally occur-
ring radium, Waukesha, Wis., went
through an intensely scrutinized applica-
tion to take water from Lake Michigan. It
took seven years, including legal appeal,
before the diversion was finalized.
Mount Pleasant, a village of
27,000 people, is a straddling community,
so the Foxconn diversion would be ex-
pected to go through similarly tough
scrutiny. But Mount Pleasant didn’t make
the diversion request. It was made in-
stead by Racine, a neighboring city on the
lakeshore. As an in-basin community,
Racine merely asked the Wisconsin De-
partment of Natural Resources to expand
its service area, and the DNR agreed.
The DNR has noted that more than half
the diverted water will be treated and
returned to the watershed. The DNR also
said even if the plant itself is outside the
basin, most of Mount Pleasant is within it.
Racine delivers much of its drinking
water anyway, it said, so the utility isn’t
doing anything extraordinary by accom-
modating new development.
But the deal violates the spirit of the
compact, which describes the basin’s wa-
ters as “precious public natural resources
shared and held in trust by the States.”
While straddling communities can re-
ceive Great Lakes water that is “used
solely for public water supply purposes,”
this new diversion is aimed at a single
industrial customer. Seventy percent of
the water that Racine delivers to Mount
Pleasant will go to Foxconn. The deal not
only removes water from the Great Lakes;
it also privatizes it.
There’s a twist to this story. After the
DNR approved the diversion, Foxconn
dramatically reduced the scope of its
plant. But its water allotment is un-
changed. Ta xpayer dollars are already
paying for expanded infrastructure. As a
steward of the Great Lakes, Wisconsin
should proportionally scale back
Foxconn’s diversion. One Ta ipei-based
analyst estimates that Foxconn’s new
plans require only 1.4 million gallons a
day, rather than 7 million.
This is not the first time that Wisconsin
has sidestepped the compact. As Peter
Annin reveals in the new edition of “The
Great Lakes Water Wars,” it tripled the
share of water allocated to the village of
Pleasant Prairie in 2010 — an apparent
attempt to entice development to the
Interstate 94 corridor.
As a good-faith partner to the seven
other states, two provinces and tribal
communities that border the Great Lakes,
Wisconsin should stop making broad
exceptions to our water protections. This
is also an opportunity to refine what is
otherwise a model water policy. T he com-
pact should be amended to state plainly
that Great Lakes water cannot be diverted
just to benefit new private development,
even when delivered by an in-basin utility.
Southeast Wisconsin has just a narrow
ribbon of land in the Great Lakes basin.
For nearby communities, water restric-
tions are frustrating. But the geological
boundary matters. Out of respect for
basin ecology, t he compact set a hard path
for diversions. The application process is
lengthy and expensive. Diversions are
meant to be a last resort.
Water is alchemizing into 21st-century
gold. California has been battered by
drought. The Colorado River and the
Ogallala Aquifer are diminished and
overtaxed. To xic industrial chemicals
known as PFAS have contaminated drink-
ing water throughout the country.
For years, people have looked to the
Great Lakes as a source of relief. In the
face of looming demands, the compact
prioritizes the ecological integrity of the
lakes. But the rules are undermined when
one of its own members skirts them. It is
difficult to see how the compact will
withstand foreseeable political pressure
from outsiders to loosen protections —
and the cumulative impact could be
disastrous.

Anna Clark is the author of “The Poisoned City:
Flint’s Water and the American Urban
Tr agedy.”

Is Foxconn


really worth


risking a


Great Lake?


T


he assumptions underlying a
controversy are often more
important than the controversy
itself.
Ta ke t he case of our b lithe a cceptance
of the electoral college. There is nothing
normal or democratic about choosing
our president through a system that
makes it ever more likely that the candi-
date who garners fewer votes will none-
theless assume p ower. For a country that
has long claimed to model democracy to
the world, this is both wrong and weird.
And there is also nothing neutral or
random about how our system works.
The electoral college tilts outcomes
toward white voters, conservative voters
and certain regions of the country. Peo-
ple outside these groups and places are
supposed to sit back and accept their
relative disenfranchisement. T here is no
reason they should, and at some point,
they won’t. This will lead to a meltdown.
Our brewing troubles were under-
scored last month by the kerfuffle that
Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ p olitical
numbers guru, set off with a story that
ran under t he headline “Trump’s E lector-
al College Edge Could Grow in 2020,
Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.”
For election junkies, Cohn’s analysis
ignited quite a stir, especially since it set
off a “Nate vs. Nate” Twitter skirmish
between Cohn and Nate Silver, another
brand-name data maven. (Yes, fate has
made “Nate” a name of choice for people
in this line of work.) Silver’s main cri-
tique was fair enough: “There’s just not
that much w e can say about the Electoral
College right now beyond a couple of
fairly loose priors (e.g. [it’s] more likely
to help than hurt Trump).”
Still, Cohn’s calculations were revela-
tory. He stressed, for example, that high-
er turnout in 2020, which is generally
seen as h elping Democrats, could actual-
ly boost Trump in the key states of
Michigan, Pennsylvania and especially
Wisconsin by bringing out more of the
Trump base.
As Cohn wrote, “the major Democrat-
ic opportunity — to mobilize nonwhite
and young voters on the periphery of
politics — would disproportionately h elp
Democrats in diverse, o ften noncompeti-
tive states.” On the o ther hand, t he GOP’s
opportunity is “to mobilize less educated
white voters, particularly those who vot-
ed in 2016 but sat out 2018.” This “would
disproportionately help them in white,
working-class areas overrepresented in
the Northern battleground states.”

Think a bout i t: T he Democratic nomi-
nee against Trump could beat him by far
more votes than Hillary Clinton did in
2016 — and still lose. Clinton led Trump
by about 2.9 million popular votes,
2.1 percent. Cohn’s conclusion: “It is even
possible that Mr. Trump could win while
losing the national vote by as much as
five percentage points.”
This means that the country could
render a negative verdict on Trump’s
time in o ffice by s winging away f rom h im
in a big way — and he would still be
president for four more years.
Defenders of such a departure from
one-person, one-vote say that if Demo-
crats run up big leads in a few states and
regions — especially California but also,
say, New York, Illinois and New England
— that shouldn’t count. Their strained
claim is that a president is somehow
more “representative” of the country if
he wins by eking out tiny margins in
several Midwestern states. This trans-
forms our d emocracy into a casino. If you
narrowly hit the right numbers in some
places, you take the pot.
What they are really defending, with-
out explicitly saying so, is the idea that
states with a higher percentage of white,
non-Hispanic voters should have a dis-
proportionate influence on who be-
comes president.
As a short-term strategic matter, Cohn
is right to stress the importance to the
2020 result of states that were closely
divided in 2016. But while I have great
affection for the Midwest, I see no just
reason for an individual voter in Califor-
nia having far less power than an
individual voter in, say, Wisconsin or
Michigan.
And the system’s bias toward white
voters only encourages Trump’s habit of
dividing the country along racial lines.
So in addition to being undemocratic,
the e lectoral college encourages a partic-
ularly odious politician with no interest
in uniting the country to do all he can to
promote minority rule.
At some point, the majority will rise
up. If Cohn’s worst-case-for-democracy
scenario m aterializes, 2020 could b e that
year. Our founders admitted that the
electoral college system they created in
the original Constitution was defective
by altering it with the 12th Amendment
in 1804. It’s t ime we f ollowed their lead in
showing the same willingness to scrap a
system that is sending us headlong into
a national crisis.
Twitter: @EJDionne

E.J. DIONNE JR.

No, it’s on its last legs


L


et us now praise an insufficient-
ly famous man, Nevada’s Demo-
cratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, who in
May gave his party’s presiden-
tial aspirants a much-needed example
of prudence. With the national media
mesmerized by those aspirants’ festival
of pandering, scant attention was given
to Sisolak’s good deed.
He vetoed legislation that would
have enrolled Nevada, against Nevada’s
interest, in the National Popular Vote
(NPV), a multistate compact to circum-
vent the Constitution’s amendment
process to achieve something the Con-
stitution’s framers rejected — the elec-
tion of presidents by popular-vote
majorities or, often, pluralities. Siso-
lak’s good deed and sound reasoning
demonstrate why those Democratic
aspirants who a dvocate abolition of the
electoral college — 1 1 do explicitly;
three o thers, w ho are p rofiles in i ndeci-
sion, are “open” t o abolition — are not
just mistaken, they are wasting their
breath.
Because in 2000 and 2016 t he Demo-
cratic candidate won the popular vote
but not the presidency, many Demo-
crats favor amending the Constitution
to replace the electoral vote system
with the election of presidents by
direct popular vote. Politically, this is
almost impossible, for t he reason many
Democrats favor it: The electoral vote
system e nhances t he political weight of
the less populous states, which are
disproportionately red. Hence the Na-
tional Popular Vote gimmick.
By joining the NPV compact, each
state agrees that its electoral votes will
be cast for the winner of the national
popular vote, even if a different candi-
date wins the popular vote in the state.
The compact would come alive when
the compacting states have, cumula-
tively, at least 270 electoral votes. So
far, 15 states and the District of Colum-
bia, with a combined total of 196 elec-
toral votes, have enacted NPV.
Nevada’s Democratic-controlled
House and Senate voted to join NPV.
Sisolak, however, vetoed this because i t
would “diminish the role of smaller
states like Nevada in national electoral
contests.”
In 2016, 32 states (including Ne-
vada) and the District of Columbia had
a larger share of the electoral votes
than of their share of the nation’s
population. Abolition of the electoral
college would diminish the weight of
these 33 entities in presidential elec-
tions. Motivated by misconceived al-
truism or tribal loyalty to the Demo-
cratic Party, some of the 32 state
legislatures (D.C.’s city council has no
say in amending the Constitution)
might vote to ratify an amendment

ending t he electoral college. Four small
states, all of them blue (Delaware,
Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont), have
joined the NPV compact.
But 13 states can block a constitu-
tional amendment. The 13 least popu-
lous states would suffer the largest
diminution o f their weight i n presiden-
tial politics. So, at least 13 probably
would kill such an amendment.
The NPV compact, an a ttempted end
run around the amendment process,
provides no enforcement mechanism if
states flinch from casting their elector-
al votes for a candidate the states’
voters spurned. Furthermore, the Con-
stitution says, “No state shall, without
the consent of Congress... enter into
any agreement or compact with an-
other state.” The Supreme Court has
allowed a few compacts without con-
gressional approval, but precedent
suggests Congress’s consent is needed
for compacts that impede federal su-
premacy, which NPV would do. And
the Senate is not apt to approve NPV,
which diminishes states that have
64 Senate votes.
To the multiplying reasons for hop-
ing that Donald Trump’s presidency is
in its final 17 months, add this: Al-
though he might assemble 270 elector-
al votes, i t is highly unlikely t hat he can
win the popular vote. So, if he is
reelected, three of the previous six
elections will have been won by the
popular-vote loser. This will fuel the
assault on the electoral college, which
has served the nation well and is
justified by sound political consider-
ations (it encourages national
campaigning and coalition building)
and constitutional principles (it tem-
pers majoritarianism to strengthen
federalism).
Finally, a potential new wrinkle in
the wrangling about the electoral col-
lege concerns Texas. Myra Adams, a
RealClearPolitics contributor, notes
the following: Since 1976, when Jimmy
Carter carried Te xas, Republican presi-
dents and nominees have easily won
there. But Trump’s margin of victory
(nine percentage points) was smaller
than in Iowa (9.4 points). His approval
last month in Te xas (51 percent ap-
prove, 45 percent disapprove) repre-
sented a 14-point net decrease since
January 2017 (54 percent approve,
34 percent disapprove). If Te xas turns
blue, Republicans, shorn of 38 secure
electoral votes, might display their
versatility of conviction and penchant
for philosophical somersaults by dis-
covering that they favor abolishing the
electoral college after all. But, by then,
Democrats will have changed their
malleable minds to favor keeping it.
[email protected]

GEORGE F. WILL

The electoral college


is here to stay


COURTESY OF A.T. MCWILLIAMS
A family photo of Luisa Wingate.

JENNIFER RUBIN


Excerpted from washingtonpost.com/people/jennifer-rubin

Why the GOP should worry


Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) announced
Wednesday that he is s tepping down at t he
end of the year, setting up a second
U.S. Senate race in the state. Well before
Isakson announced his retirement, Geor-
gia was on Democrats’ list of states they
could possibly flip. President Trump won
the state by about five percentage points
but, two years later, Stacey Abrams came
within 55,000 votes (in an election rife
with claims of chicanery and suppression
tactics) of winning the governorship, and
the state’s 6th Congressional District
flipped f rom Republican t o Democrat w ith
the election of Rep. Lucy McBath, whose
son h ad been killed by gun v iolence.
Moreover, according to recent polling,
Trump’s favorability in the state has gone
from plus-18 to plus-2. With a strong p resi-
dential nominee — someone who can turn
out African American votes in large num-
bers — it’s not inconceivable that Georgia
and a t least one o f its Senate seats might g o
Democratic.
Isakson’s resignation should under-
score a few o bservations about 2020. First,
a Democratic Senate takeover certainly is
within the realm of possibility, especially
if Alabama Republicans repeat their
2017 error and nominate Roy Moore to go
up against Democratic Sen. Doug Jones.

Other vulnerable Republican incumbents
include Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Cory
Gardner (Colo.) and Martha McSally
(Ariz.).
Democrats can add to the list Iowa,
North Carolina a nd e ven Montana, i f Mon-
tana Gov. Steve Bullock drops out of the
presidential r ace.
Second, Senate pickup chances in s tates
such as Georgia and Arizona (not to men-
tion Te xas, should presidential candidates
Beto O’Rourke or Julián Castro be per-
suaded to run) remind us that the map for
Democrats is expanding in states with
substantial nonwhite populations and up-
scale suburbs (where Republicans b ombed
in 2018). Considering a presidential candi-
date’s electability means looking at the
electoral map where the right nominee
(say, a woman and/or nonwhite person)
could pump up votes in larger Midwest
cities and suburbs all over t he c ountry, and
African American and Hispanic votes in
swing southwestern and southeastern
states.
Third, it is increasingly likely that if
Democrats find a nominee who can spread
the map, he or she may help deliver the
Senate with states such as Colorado, North
Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. In short, a
candidate who can win in the Upper Mid-
west and elsewhere may be the key to the
presidency and the Senate.
Free download pdf