RALEIGH – Is this really all right?
Former Rep. Shelly Willingham is running against fellow Democrat and incumbent Clark Jenkins in Senate District 3. The two candidates nearly tied in the July 20 primary and face each other Tuesday in the runoff for this eastern North Carolina seat encompassing all or parts of Rocky Mount, Tarboro, Williamston, Greenville, and other communities.
Jenkins is stressing his record as an influential member of Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight’s leadership team, even as a freshman. He is a co-chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee and has made his voice heard on a variety of issues ranging from economic development (he’s for it) to rail transit in Charlotte and the Triangle (thankfully, he’s skeptical).
Willingham, who works for the nonprofit running the local Smart Start program, is trying a different tack, to put it mildly. “Our Time Has Come,” proclaims his campaign literature. It is the central theme of Willingham’s message and it represents, he says, the fact that District 3 is predominately black, about 60-40. “The districts were redrawn in order that black folks would have an opportunity to have a person that looks like them represent them,’ Willingham told the Tarboro Daily Southerner. “We need to seize the opportunity.”
He’s black, in case you didn’t know, and Jenkins is white. Willingham is making a clear, unvarnished appeal to racial solidarity. And as far as I can tell, no one is criticizing him publicly for it. It may even succeed on Election Day, as Willingham was almost the top vote-getter the first time around in a crowded field.
The question I began this column with is a serious one. Is this situation really all right? The facts lead one to conclude that Willingham is, essentially, correct. District 3 was drawn, as were several other House and Senate districts, to maximize the chance of an African-American being elected to the legislature. Indeed, minority-oriented districts are widely interpreted to be required under the federal Voting Rights Act. It would be odd to agree that the VRA mandates districts drawn for black candidates and then to excoriate black candidates when they say so explicitly as part of their campaign strategy.
It is also true that white Democrats used black voters for years as political fodder – distributing them to generate just enough loyal Democratic votes to prop up the state’s political establishment against waves of Republican insurgency. There is a case to be made that the racial-gerrymandering version of the VRA was a needed corrective to decades of political manipulation.
But there is also a strong political case to be made that race-based districts and appeals to racial solidarity have no place in a society still struggling to remove the vestiges of racism that poisoned it and its politics for generations. Would we settle for a white politician campaigning so brazenly on race? Of course not. I’m just wondering when the double-standard is going to disappear.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.