In federal court this week in Chicago, a lawyer representing the state legislature argued that race really doesn’t matter when it comes to drawing electoral maps.
“Illinois in 2020 is not your grandfather’s Illinois,” said Sean Berkowitz, the attorney defending the legislative district maps signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in September, in a hearing at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse downtown.
Illinois today “is not Mississippi in 1965 or Illinois in 1980,” Berkowitz added, according to a report by Capitol News Illinois.
Berkowitz argued that race is almost beside the point in modern-day voting. He cited the fact that many white voters “cross over” to vote for politicians of color. They helped elect Kwame Raoul as state attorney general and Tammy Duckworth as U.S. senator.
A few blocks away, elected officials in City Hall had begun proving Berkowitz wrong. They were engaging in a fight for power, with race serving as the defining element.
In the Mississippi of 1965, as with the Illinois of 1980, white voters struggled to hold on to power in the face of a rising Black vote. That’s not the case anymore.
This time, in both the statehouse and in City Hall, the power of the Latino vote is a defining element. And unlike in Mississippi in the ’60s, or Illinois of the ’80s, there can be no firm expectation that courts will protect voting rights reliably in the 2020s.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymandering is outside the court’s purview — essentially, that the drawing of electoral maps for party advantage is a political act beyond the court’s reach — the path has been cleared for ever more aggressive disenfranchisement.
True, the Justice Department this month sued Texas over an electoral map that it views as the byproduct of race-based discrimination. But with the 2019 Supreme Court ruling as prelude, there is no telling what might happen in the Texas case.
The high court ruling has had an impact on redistricting, from Springfield to City Hall.
The Democrats in charge of the Illinois legislature seemed emboldened this year to draw maps that favored their party, both in electing a new state legislature and in sending Democratic representatives to Washington. This hardly came as a surprise: After all, Republicans are doing the same, in the far more numerous Republican-controlled states.
At the city level, party is beside the point. Only the Democratic Party matters, so the fight to redraw the city’s 50 wards is almost exclusively about race. And instead of white voters suppressing Black people — as was the case in Mississippi in 1965 and Illinois in 1980 — in Chicago in 2021, the current power struggle pits Blacks versus Latinos.
The struggle is over just a few seats. The council’s Latino Caucus wants 15 Latino-dominant wards, based on their population growth since the last census in 2010. Blacks want to hang on to 17 wards, despite population losses. Both sides seem determined to hold their ground, and an eventual court battle seems likely.
And it’s no wonder. Anyone old enough to remember Harold Washington and the battle for control of the City Council can understand what a difference a few council seats can make.
When Washington won the mayor’s office in 1983, the breakthrough by the city’s first Black mayor seemed to mark the beginning of a new era in Chicago government and politics. But a cabal of white aldermen — 29 of them, led by Ed Burke and Ed Vrdolyak from their South Side power bases — had different ideas.
The Vrdolyak 29, the raucous “Council Wars” and a political stalemate all ensued.
Then along came a federal court ruling late in late 1985 that redressed the racial injustice. It found borders drawn on seven wards gave unfair advantage to white candidates for the City Council. It demanded new ward boundaries and a do-over vote that would change the face of Chicago government for years.
That vote handed control of city government to Washington. It ushered in an era of reform.
Washington had less than two years after the court ruling before he died of heart failure, stricken in his City Hall office. But during that brief time, he initiated reforms in the interest of racial equity and justice that would have been unimaginable before the court had its say.
The struggle for dominance in the City Council this time is between Blacks and Latinos, not Blacks and whites like back in the 1980s. It lacks the caustic callousness of the two Eddies, and also the charisma and creativity that Harold Washington showed.
And if it ever makes its way into the courts, the power struggle will lack the certainty that prevailed last time, when a defense of voting rights was taken as guaranteed in the American courts.
This is not the Chicago of the 1980s, or the court system of that era, either. And in the context of a truly representative government and the need for equity-minded reforms, the differences mark a loss for voters.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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