A.G. Gancarski
The Duval County Legislative Delegation meets Thursday at Jacksonville’s City Hall.
Had Janet Adkins not made her now widely reported comments about the redrawn 5th Congressional District of Corrine Brown there might not have been so much attention on the meeting. Adkins had commented at a recent Republican Party meeting that by “reducing the percentage of minorities in that district and you’ve drawn it in such a fashion that perhaps a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote.”
Three guesses who Adkins meant by “them.”
Well, Adkins should be credited, at least, for adding subject matter more exciting than the local J-1 bill that will ease drinking restrictions in restaurants in the Riverside and Avondale Commercial Character Areas (a bill not sponsored, for some reason, by the area’s actual representative, Jay Fant, but by Reggie Fullwood). And more exciting, by far, than Charles McBurney‘s urging of a resolution backing the Lenny Curry position on opposing surface water withdrawals from the St. Johns River by water hogs downstate.
Those are important bills, yes. But the Adkins comments get to something deeper.
They get, obviously, to the divide between white and black in Northeast Florida. It’s impossible to imagine comments like Adkins’ being made about reshaping Ander Crenshaw‘s district. Or really about any other district in the area.
Think of it: Adkins essentially said that the district was including prisoners, on purpose, to subvert the very idea of a minority access district. Conveniently, the biggest pushers of disenfranchising felons are Republicans. To strip away their rights as citizens, and then to add their bodies to the roll being counted for apportionment purposes, is a noxious sleight of hand that sounds like nothing so much as a 21st century version of the Three-Fifths Compromise, in its cynical subversion of the very concept of citizenship.
The Adkins comments also get to the heart of a big part of the local Republican agenda: to destroy Brown by any means necessary.
They can’t beat her in an election, so they play games with maps, at once diluting the number of minorities in the new district and, equally important, moving the map of the district to areas where Brown has no familiarity. Meanwhile, cue the news reports about former State Sen. Al Lawson running against her.
Left unsaid in these reports: Lawson was 0 for 2 in previous runs for U.S. Congress.
Also left unsaid: No one in Jacksonville, beyond political junkies, knows who Lawson is. Most people, if asked, would confuse the name with Al Letson, our local NPR radio superstar.
But this re-mapping isn’t about the people in Jacksonville, much less the African-Americans who rely on Congresswoman Brown to be their voice on a variety of issues that white politicians (and most local black politicians, if we’re being real about it) ignore repeatedly.
It’s easy, as we see again and again, to reduce Brown to caricature. People do it all the time, and it’s probably the most acceptable manifestation of racism in the political class locally. Link to a Corrine Brown story and almost invariably, someone mocks her saying “Go Gators” on the floor of the U.S. Congress, or her saying that she works “27/6.”
The problem is that, for all the mockery, these would-be comics don’t see the actual work she does.
They don’t see her showing up at a Duval County School Board workshop to slow down plans to change, forever, the composition and purpose of neighborhood schools in the urban core. They don’t seem aware of her work in Congress advocating for the interests of Jacksonville. Her advocacy for issues such as medical marijuana or women’s reproductive rights. Who wants to talk about issues when there are scandals or misstatements from years or even decades ago that can be recycled into memes?
As we reported Wednesday, the official Duval Democratic party is not thrilled with Adkins’ comments.
“What’s clear to me is Janet Adkins’ comment is exactly what we don’t need in politics today,” Party Chairman Neil Henrichsen said. “It reflects an effort to deprive citizens of real choice and demonstrates a calculating ‘my team only’ approach to government which is not in the interests of the community.”
Adkins’ comments, as blundering as they were, actually were a public service. They showed that Brown wasn’t being hyperbolic when she objected to the new maps because of the prisons included in the new district. And they showed what this effort is really all about.
