feralnostalgia:

or more specifically: fucking white people in little rock.

in sociolinguistics we were talking about mother-tongue shift today, and one of the variables in a particular paper we were reading was political power achieved by Latinos in any given municipality.  (your children are more likely to speak Spanish as well as English if you actually have Latinos elected to office and public school policies which promote bilingualism.)

anyways, to explain how certain groups don’t necessarily have political power just because they live in a certain area, the professor brought up a current supreme court case.  apparently in Texas over the last 10 years, the population has grown enough that Texas gets 4 more seats in the house of representatives.  naturally, rich white fucks in Texas rigged the redistricting process so that all the new districts had a white majority, even though absolutely all of the growth in population in Texas over the last 10 years is from Latinos.  when sued and the Texas Supreme Court found them guilty of this, they did it again so that “only” two of the four new congressional districts were white-majority, like a 50/50 compromise between representative democracy and racism was somehow fair.  so that’s going to the supreme court this summer.

anyways, he then brought up Little Rock.  apparently the 2010 census is the first time that we’ve had a Black majority in the city.  51%.  it’s not a large majority, but there it is.

now, there are 10 seats on the little rock board of directors.  nice round number.  that said, there are only 7 actual wards in the city.  3 of the 7 wards have elected black representatives.  the remaining 3 seats on the board are apparently just added for kicks, have no constituents attached to them, are open to anyone in the city, and are all filled by white people whose campaigns were funded by other white people and who live in predominantly white neighborhoods.

mmkay.  so the mayor was once one of those magical extra representatives the rich white fucks in west little rock created to double their vote.  just before the black majority became overtly clear, the city government switched from a relatively weak executive where the actual representatives had more power to a strong executive model where the mayor gets to make more decisions independent of what the city population or their representatives think.  bear in mind that even had this not happened, the white suburbs would have still basically had double the representation the black areas of town would have.

I know this stuff happens, but it’s kind of infuriating to hear how people who are actually in office right now deliberately conspired to disenfranchise the black community in this city.