Last week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution carried a story saying Georgia’s legislature is more “diverse” than ever.
Racial and ethnic minorities are now about 39% of the members, up from 36% two years ago.
But here’s the reality: It’s not a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong. “Diversity,” the holy grail of the left, is a good thing. But in the Legislature, there is not true diversity. It’s Us. And it’s Them. And it falls along racial lines.
There are 236 legislators in the two chambers: 103 Democrats and 133 Republicans. (A 100-80 majority in the House and 33-23 in the Senate.)
Of those 103 Democrats, 83% are minorities. Of the GOP’s 133, 96% are white.
More so, out of 236 legislators, just three are white male Democrats, a species that just a generation ago ran the show. Now they’re as rare as the white rhinoceros.
I called state Sen. Nan Orrock, who came to the Capitol in 1987. She is white, represents south Atlanta and has seen it all. She asked about the point of my story.
In Georgia, it looks like we have the White Party and the Black and Brown Party, I told her.
“That’s not helpful,” she said. “That’s the way the Republicans want to frame it. They want it to be, ‘Why would you want to be in that party?’ That’s why they want to get rid of white Democrats.”
“It’s a Legislature that has been deliberately gerrymandered,” she continued. “The GOP has a long record of forcing white Democrats into retirement by putting them into districts they will lose.”
Credit: Maureen Downey
Credit: Maureen Downey
By that she means drawing white Dems into districts with large minority (usually Black) populations. About 75% of the Democrats in the legislature are Black.
Former Congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux, who is white, is a victim of that strategy. In 2022, GOP redistricting made U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, who is Black, jump from her suddenly more conservative north metro district to the friendlier waters of Bourdeaux’s Gwinnett County-based district, one she had won just two years earlier.
McBath beat her 2-to-1.
Bourdeaux has been irritating some Dems lately by saying the party has moved away from being a broad coalition of varying ideas to being one focused on identity politics, and in the clutches of increasingly partisan special interest groups.
“Right now (Democrats) have become extremely intolerant of anyone who deviates from the orthodoxy, and it’s an orthodox out of alignment with where the majority of Americans are,” she said on the AJC’s Politically Georgia radio podcast after Donald Trump was elected in November.
We talked this week and, while she is still speaking out, she has reined in her rhetoric because of the body blows from fellow party members who don’t want to hear the opinions of a defeated white moderate Democrat.
“There’s a difference between being a political party and being an advocacy organization that is there to do consciousness-raising activities,” Bourdeaux told me.
In other words, do you want to be on the battle lines with a bullhorn speaking “truth” to power? Or do you want to have a seat in the halls of power and be in the majority. You know, actual power. In the state House, for instance, you need 91 seats. If you don’t have it, then you really don’t matter.
Credit: Shannon McCaffrey
Credit: Shannon McCaffrey
And currently, Georgia’s Democrats in the state Legislature really don’t matter.
Bourdeaux says Democratic lawsuits to create more Black seats in the Legislature has given Republicans cover to keep squeezing out the Dems.
“The Republicans said, ‘You want more Black districts? Then we’ll wipe out the white districts,’” Bourdeaux said. Minority Democrats “have traded titular power for actual power.”
Michael Thurmond, who just left a two-term stint as DeKalb County’s CEO, chuckled when I told him about Bourdeaux’s comments. He was there in the Legislature in the early 1990s when it all started.
At the time, Georgia Democrats were trying to hang on to power. So in redistricting they tried to spread out Black voters to several districts to have a chance to hold on to more seats. However, those seats would not necessarily have Black pols in them.
At the time, a contingent of Black pols wanted to create majority Black districts to ensure that they got elected. They cited the Voting Rights Act, and, oddly, got GOP help.
After the 1990 Census, Georgia got an 11th Congressional seat. Cynthia McKinney, then an ambitious state legislator, worked with Republicans to draw up a third “Black” seat. The GOP plan to create more “Black” seats had a code name: MaxBlack.
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
“To get more Black seats, you had to sacrifice white Democrats. It was a deal with the devil,” Thurmond said. “I was against this strategy and was roundly criticized. In the long-term, it would undermine the power of Black people.”
The scheme worked like a charm — for the ascending GOP, that is.
In 1990, Republicans had just two of Georgia’s 10 Congressional seats. By mid-decade, they had eight of 11 and African Americans represented the three seats still held by Dems. It became a pattern seen throughout the South ever since. If you’re a white member of Congress from the South, you’re almost certainly a Republican. If you’re a Democrat, you are almost always Black.
It’s gotten that way in the Legislature, too.
State Rep. Scott Holcomb, one of the Legislature’s three remaining white male Democrats, said: “I’ll betcha if you point out there’s just three white (Democratic) males of out 236, people will be surprised.”
He added that ethnic-racial sorting of the Legislature “makes me uneasy. The breakdown shows how polarized we are on race. I think it reflects the system is not healthy.”
