By Garry Blanson
As I was going to look up the old nursery rhyme about “St. Ives” — you all still remember that old nursery rhyme — something made me realize that the redistricting currently going on in Louisiana and other Southern states today is simply “history repeating itself.”
“What do you mean by that, Garry?” Well, I mean that what Louisiana and other Southern states are trying to do today by restructuring the old maps was being done in Louisiana and other states in the South during “the first Reconstruction period.” Even though what they are trying to do has been called by different names, the results generally always end up being the same.
Furthermore, they are following in the footsteps of their White ancestors before them. Additionally, I honestly feel that White Louisiana state Congress members are using similar tactics as back then in order to sway the outcome of public elections and disenfranchise Black citizens in the process.
Make no mistake about it, what they are doing has been carefully thought out and planned to make sure they control the outcome of nearly every public election. You see, all the current White Congress members had to do was go back and study the history of what their White ancestors had already done during “the first Reconstruction period.”
In case anyone was curious to know exactly what techniques White people used during “the first Reconstruction period,” here are two of the more popular “redistricting techniques” that were being carried out by White members in the Louisiana State Congress back in the late 1800s.
The first technique was called “packing and cracking,” which was a method used to redraw election boundaries to favor one political party over another, which is exactly what the new Louisiana redistricting map is going to do. While “packing” was designed to cluster voters within a geographic area to ensure a biased result, “cracking” was set up to distribute voters across geographic areas to dilute their voting strength in a specific area of the state.
That is exactly what I feel the White Louisiana Congress members want to use the new maps to accomplish.
By the way, there was also another popular technique known as “fusion,” which was when two or more political parties would team up, so to speak. Basically, it involved “a specific movement” that occurred primarily in the South and the West during the late 1800s, when the Populist Party “fused” with the Republican Party in an attempt to challenge Democratic Party rule.
Today, we are seeing this when either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party decides to “fuse” with an independent or third political party.
Well, by looking at what happened in the past, I now have an even better idea as to why the White Louisiana Congress members are pushing so hard for “redistricting,” and I hope that you do too!
