Terry Smith

Race and Money in Politics

The relationship between race and money in American politics is not obvious but is captured quite succinctly by the above quotes. Jamilah Nasheed was entangled in Missouri’s 2011 race-infused redistrict- ing in which the state lost one of its congressional seats. Republicans controlled both bodies of the state legislature and decided to eliminate the seat of Democrat Russ Carnahan, whose district was located in the St. Louis metropolitan area, as was that of William Lacy Clay, Jr., a black Democrat. Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed the remapping. To override, the Republicans in the assembly needed four Democrats. Four black Democrats supplied their votes for a plan designed to save two of the state’s three Democratic congressional seats, both occupied by African Americans. Nasheed’s statements underscore the dual role of blacks in the American political process as both the two-party system’s most loyal partisans and a racial minority with interests distinct from either political party. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the United States Supreme Court has usually typecast blacks as merely a racial group and in so doing has treated them as outliers in a political process that it has heavily policed in order to ensure illusory colorblindness.