What Happens When Blacks Suppress White Votes?

LOS ANGELES--News that the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against blacks in Noxubee County, Miss., accusing black Democratic party officials of suppressing white votes at first seems laughable, if not downright absurd. For nearly a century, Mississippi whites used every trick in the book, from intimidation to physical violence, to keep blacks from the polls.

The lawsuit seems even more crazy given the well-documented reports of continued voter intimidation and suppression against black voters nationwide. The NAACP, a legion of citizen watchdog groups, People For the American Way and Democrats have filed lawsuits in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and other states claiming vote fraud before and after the 2004 presidential elections.

There is no smoking-gun proof that the Bush Justice Department systematically subverted the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act to diminish black political strength and bolster the Republicans. But Bush did not aggressively fight to implement the Help America Vote Act of 2002, or lobby Congress to speed up funding for the initiative. Furthermore, Republican voter groups were caught red-handed in Oregon and Nevada dumping Democratic voter registrations. Republican registrars have limited the number of ballots, cut back the number of polling places in heavily black neighborhoods and rejected thousands of applications on the most spurious technical grounds.

The Justice Department has taken no action in these cases. Instead, it has taken action against Noxubee County blacks. And it should have.

Blacks outnumber whites 3-to-1 in the county. The crushing number advantage guarantees that they'd dominate county politics in a fair election. Instead, says the Justice Department, the black chair of the county Democratic Party chose to cheat to disfranchise whites by intimidation, bribery, falsifying and manipulating absentee ballots and even importing black outsiders to run for office.

If whites had used the same tactics, blacks would have loudly screamed foul and demanded that the Justice Department take action. But they have largely kept silent in this case, in part because of their fierce loathing of the Bush administration, and in part due to their deep suspicion that the Justice Department is using the lawsuit as yet another ploy to diminish black voting strength.

The caution is understandable, but this walking on racial eggshells leaves blacks prone to the charge that they propagate double standards on race: that, when a white commits a racially offensive act, blacks rush to condemn it but are silent when an African-American does the same thing. That swings the door open even wider for blacks who commit crimes or inappropriate acts to blame whites for their misdeeds, and thereby divert attention from their wayward acts, or even get support and sympathy for them.

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