Given NC history, GOP’s black suppression the gravest sin

It’s been a tough few months for race relations in North Carolina. An array of federal judges, some appointed by Republican presidents and some by Democrats, issued detailed decrees finding our governor and General Assembly had engaged in three separate, intended schemes of racial electoral suppression. In federal redistricting, in state legislative apportionment,and in the multi-faceted voter ID law, Republicans, the courts ruled, lied about their asserted goals. They sought to hinder African-Americans, not to secure ballot integrity or statutory compliance. The discrimination was purposeful, pointed, old school.

Then Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state Republican Party, urged Republican-majority local election boards (which Woodhouse plays a role in appointing) to double down on racial repression. In an email to GOP appointees, he warned them “to make party line changes to early voting” by limiting hours and keeping polling sites closed on Sundays. A number of counties quickly complied. The state board accepted some restrictions and rejected others. Hesitant Republicans said they were accused of being traitors to the party. Woodhouse explained he’s “an unabashed partisan” and “our folks are angry and opposed to Sunday voting.”

By overtly pressing a Republican policy to eliminate “souls to the polls” programs popular in black churches, Woodhouse stepped beyond the traditional pretense embraced by his party colleagues. We’re after black folks, he effectively explained, because they’re our adversaries. And our opposition is “unabashed.” His emailed instruction hit the papers a month ago. No Republican leader demanded his censure or resignation. Sen. Bob Rucho and Rep. David Lewis, whom the federal courts had already found to have engaged in race discrimination, wrote to the state elections board, backing the Woodhouse play.

Republican stalwart Carter Wrenn brushed aside the habitual subterfuge: “If African-Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they’d have kept early voting right where it was. It wasn’t about discriminating against (them), they just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democratic.”

Candid perhaps. But, in this instance, Republican partisanship was said to be a justification for suppressing black electoral participation – not a refutation of the purposeful “surgically precise” discrimination itself. Blacks in North Carolina have heard an endless cascade of rationales for discrimination. They purportedly weren’t persons, or citizens, or equals, or their access would produce “mongrelization,” or violate God’s will, or endanger white women, or white children, or public safety and harmony, or the sanctity of states’ rights.

A surprise for no one

Now a new refrain unfolds: “We’re not discriminating against you because you’re black, but because of the way you think and the way you vote.” The move can surprise no student of North Carolina history and, I’m guessing, no black person whatsoever.

The political party that controls all three branches of N.C. government, through its director, has espoused a position that seeks to use state power to suppress the electoral participation of African-Americans. What if, instead of Woodhouse sending an urgent official email to board appointees, the Republican Party adopted a formal platform plank saying, “We are committed to the suppression of electoral participation by African-Americans”? Would that be OK? What’s the difference? Only a cynical and implausible deniability? Is the N.C. Republican Party’s legitimacy based on so thin and pre-textual a lie?

Hindering the participation rights of racial minorities is, I’m inclined to believe, the highest sin in a pluralistic democracy. Given our brutal history, and our past hypocrisies, I am certain it is the gravest sin in this democracy. Racial inequity has been our largest constitutional transgression from the first day of our existence as a commonwealth until this morning. If the purposeful burdening of African-Americans triggers no obligation of disassociation in decent people, I’m not sure what would.

I can attest that Republican leaders take potent umbrage at being compared to the segregationists of a half-century ago. But why is that? Is it because they seek only to disenfranchise blacks, not to hang or shoot or beat or use water cannons on them? Is the implicit suggestion that, given the treatment their grandparents got, African-Americans today ought to be grateful their government now pursues only electoral suppression?

North Carolina is blessed to have perhaps the country’s most charismatic and inspiring civil rights leader. But the continuing intentional repression of blacks is not just the Rev. William Barber’s problem, or the NAACP’s problem, or the Moral Monday movement’s problem. It is North Carolina’s problem. Front and center. Overtly and officially urged by the state’s dominant political party. When will white Tar Heels finally refuse to embrace discrimination against black ones?

This story was originally published September 17, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Given NC history, GOP’s black suppression the gravest sin."