September 21, 2007
Washington, D.C. VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 AM EST A reply to John Steele Gordon, who writes: “I know why Mr. Zeitz would like D.C. to be treated as a state or even made one—it would provide two guaranteed very liberal seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.” Wrong. I support granting full congressional representation to Washington, D.C., because its citizens pay federal taxes, serve in the armed forces, and shoulder the same responsibilities as the citizens of Wyoming, whose numbers are fewer. To date, three residents of the District have died in the Iraq War. Their parents deserve a voice and a vote in Congress. (We could just as easily reverse the equation: Mr. Gordon supports treating Wyoming’s population of 509,000 more equally than D.C.’s population of 581,000 because it provides two guaranteed very conservative seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.) Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that we allow District residents to vote in Maryland House and Senate races is flawed. Most problematic are the abstract questions of sovereignty, representation and consent. Under Mr. Gordon’s plan (which is, by the way, a political non-starter: It will never, ever happen), the residents of Washington, D.C., would be lumped with Marylanders in federal elections, even though they do not share the same tax structure, local political institutions, school system, or interests vis-à-vis the federal government. Who would decide how D.C. residents were apportioned among new or existing U.S. House seats? The Maryland State Legislature, of course. Would D.C. residents have representation in the Maryland State House? Not under Mr. Gordon’s proposal. Would they enjoy input into the laws governing congressional elections? No, they would not. Mr. Gordon’s proposal ignores the fact that Washington, D.C., however narrow its economic base may be, is a discreet geographic and population entity that should enjoy full sovereignty over itself and full weight in Congress. Moreover, his proposal dilutes the representation of Maryland residents and thereby conflicts with their constitutional rights as well. As for the question of race, in his recurring screed against Democrats, whom he accuses of being obsessed with “race, gender, and class,” Mr. Gordon ironically demonstrates the opposite point: It is he who seems obsessed with “race, gender, and class.” Anyone who claims that D.C. statehood has faltered only on the issue of race is hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. Anyone, like Mr. Gordon, who claims that “race and racism [have not] played any part at all, at least in the modern era,” is also hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. (What on Earth does Jesse Jackson have to do with this issue? Who’s obsessed with race? How did gender enter this discussion? Until Mr. Gordon invoked it, I believe it was off the table.) Historically, Washington, D.C., was a Southern-leaning town with a great deal of race tension between its black residents and the federal government, and between its black residents and surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia. D.C. retained slavery until halfway through the Civil War and was slow to desegregate its public accommodations in the twentieth century. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s the federal government’s buildings and facilities were segregated. When the famed opera singer Marian Anderson attempted to give a concert at Constitution Hall in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the building, refused her access. The hall manager even boasted that “no Negro will ever appear in this hall while I am manager.” (She ultimately sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, courtesy of Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I suppose Mr. Gordon would consider “obsessed with race, class and gender.”) In recent years, the city’s relationship with its suburban neighbors has been similarly strained. Rep. Stan Parris, who represented Fairfax County, Virginia, in the mid-1970s and again through the 1980s, famously called a bridge connecting Virginia and D.C. “the longest bridge in the world because it connects Virginia to Africa.” Some of his constituents thought this was a terrible thing to say, and others did not. In 1993, State Senator Warren Barry fondly recalled this quip at a Republican party tribute dinner to Parris and suggested that the bridge be renamed the “Soul Brothers Causeway.” All of this goes to demonstrate that Washington, D.C., has had an uneasy rapport with its suburban neighbors, and much of that tension owed to race. To deny that too many people continue to regard majority-black cities as less deserving or civilized than white suburbs is just as facile as denying that many people in this country have moved beyond that way of thinking.
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