Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction.

• Author: YOUNG, RICHARD P.
• Position: Review

Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction By J. Morgan Kousser Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. x, 590. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Gerrymandering is as old as representative democracy. The word dates back to 1812, when Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and his Republican state legislature carved their state into voting districts that gave the Republicans twenty-nine state senators to the Federalists' eleven--despite the fact that the Federalists had out-polled the Republicans 51,766 to 50,164. One of those districts resembled a squatting salamander. Engraver Elkanah Tisdale added claws, wings, and fangs and named his creation a "gerrymander" (see Roger Buterfield, The American Past [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947], 51). The Supreme Court never ruled gerrymandering unconstitutional, and it left the power of defining district shapes to the states until Shaw v. Reno (1993). In that case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, speaking for the Court majority in a five-to-four decision, made a distinction between political gerrymandering, which she considered constitutional, and racial gerrymandering, which she ruled a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Shaw v. Reno is at the heart of Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, historian J. Morgan Kousser's closely reasoned critique of the Court's recent rulings on the constitutionality of "majority-minority" congressional districts--districts created for the purpose of ensuring adequate minority representation in the House of Representatives.

Colorblind Injustice is an angry book. Kousser is convinced that in a series of recent decisions, beginning with Shaw v. Reno, the Rehnquist Court has destroyed the hard-won gains that African Americans have made in political representation. Kousser considers those decisions to be bad law, bad history, and bad public policy, and he hopes "to set voting rights policy straight by getting its history right" (p. 2). In the pursuit of that ambition, he has written an exhaustive study of the recent history of voting rights, a study so carefully researched and intelligently reasoned that it will probably become the definitive work on this subject. He has also written a book that defies summarization. Kousser is so thorough in his dissection of court rulings, so sensitive to the details of history, and so committed to the belief that historical change is the result of relatively small incremental changes that his argument can be sketched only in the broadest strokes.

Kousser begins his analysis with a celebration of the achievements of the Second Reconstruction, a period when "the Court's willingness to protect the rights of minority citizens or let Congress do so, along with the stable majority of experienced and sympathetic members of Congress from 1954 to 1994, allowed judges, Congress, bureaucrats, and...