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Keeping Race on the Agenda

A new session of Congress opened here this week with the winners of last November’s elections coming to town to make their mark. For Asian Pacific Americans, it was a bittersweet opening, because of three losses: the physical loss of Rep. Patsy Mink, who passed away last September, and the electoral losses of Stan Matsunaka and Matt Matsunaga, whose congressional bids from the 4th District in eastern Colorado and the 2nd District of Hawai‘i, respectively, were supported by many APAs outside their districts.

The loss of Rep. Mink means that APAs now have only two senators (Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka from Hawai‘i), three representatives (Bob Matsui and Mike Honda from California, and David Wu from Oregon) and one congressional delegate (Eni Faleomavaega from American Samoa) in Congress.

Democrat Madeleine Bordallo, a white woman who has served as lieutenant governor, senator, and wife of former Guam Governor Ricardo Bordallo, will be the new congressional delegate representing Guam. She replaces Robert Underwood, who lost the race for governor of Guam.

The dwindling number of APAs in Congress and the absolute lack of APA women in Congress make it imperative that we as an APA community coalesce behind APA women candidates for Congress in 2004. Now is the time for each of us to reach out to our sisters and encourage them to run. The best candidates, quite frankly, are not those who will be promoting themselves, so it is very important that we look around us and promote those who have done good work for the community and who deserve to be elevated to a higher office.

The recent furor over Sen. Trent Lott’s statements has put the focus on minority politics in Washington D.C. According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that specializes in African American political affairs, only 50 of the nation’s 9,040 black elected officials are Republicans, 3,700 say they are Democrats, and the rest are Independents or are unwilling to declare a party preference. While the pull of President Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” has made some African Americans less likely to say they are Democrats, most are still unwilling to say they are Republicans.

Mark L. Plotkin, political commentator for WTOP Radio in Washington has come up with an innovative way for Sen. Lott and the Republicans to prove that their professed desire to empower African Americans is more than empty rhetoric. They can vote to allow the 570,000 residents of the District of Columbia to be represented in Congress by a fully-empowered representative and two voting senators, just like states with smaller populations such as Wyoming (494,000). Most of the residents of the District are African American, so their continued disenfranchisement (based largely on GOP refusal to allow representation for a city which votes for the Democrats 9 to 1) amounts to a continuation of the second class status fostered by slavery, Jim Crow laws and segregation.

With Sen. Lott leading the way, the GOP could enact legislation by a simple majority of both houses of Congress. President Bush, in a spirit of doing more than appointing a few individuals to his cabinet, could empower hundreds of thousands with the stroke of a pen. Now that would be a wonderful way to start the new session of Congress!

Meanwhile, the fallout from the Lott affair continues both in Washington and across the nation. According to the Washington Post, both the White House and the Republican National Committee declined to comment on a racial controversy involving a Bush administration ally who is campaigning to become chairman of the California Republican Party. Bill Back, the California Republican Party’s vice chairman who is seeking the chairmanship, sent out an e-mail newsletter in 1999 reproducing an essay that said “history might have taken a better turn” if the South had won the Civil War and that “the real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won.”

Here in D.C., Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts ended his career as the only African American Republican in either house of Congress, leaving the GOP with no congressional faces when they have to go before the cameras to discuss cutbacks in welfare or other programs that impact minority communities. Black conservatives, meanwhile, have scheduled a series of meetings with GOP leaders to ask why the GOP cannot do more to promote minorities in the party.

Reach Phil Tajitsu Nash at pnash@campaignadvantage.com.