Whose Votes Count? : Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights

Abigail M. Thernstrom

ISBN 10: 0674951964 / ISBN 13: 9780674951969

Published by Harvard University Press Jan 1989, 1989

About this Item

Neuware - 'Thernstrom maneuvers successfully between the civil rights ideology and the requirements of democratic politics. She sustains a strong concern for the struggles of American blacks while conceding very little to the affirmative action or electoral quota position. Exactly right.' - Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Seller Inventory # 9780674951969

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Whose Votes Count? : Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights
• Publisher: Harvard University Press Jan 1989
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674951964
• ISBN 13: 9780674951969
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Weight: 499 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that all citizens have the right to vote without regard to their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” For almost a century the Fifteenth Amendment was a dead letter. Throughout the South millions of nonwhite Americans were excluded from the political process by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices. The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end that injustice.

In this absorbing book, political scientist Abigail Thernstrom analyzes the radical transformation of the Voting Rights Act in the years since its passage. She shows how a measure carefully crafted to open the polling booths to southern blacks has evolved into a powerful tool for affirmative action in the electoral sphere―a means to promote black and Hispanic officeholding by creating “safe” seats for minority candidates. What began as an effort to give minorities a fair shake has become a means of ensuring a fair share.

Thernstrom demonstrates how voting rights have created a “political thicket” in which Congress, the courts, and the justice Department have been lost. Why this should be true, how small statutory changes led to large and unexpected results, how civil rights groups prevailed against a conservative Senate, how Republicans have benefited from gerrymandering to increase black officeholding―these stories are all part of Thernstrom’s well-told tale.

Even though the concept of the right to vote retains an aura of moral simplicity, the issue of minority voting rights is perhaps the most complex, yet least studied, of all affirmative action issues. Whose Votes Count? should stimulate the overdue discussion that the subject deserves among all those concerned with American politics.

About the Author

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.