Merit, Not Race, Was Pivotal Factor in VA Elections

Merit, Not Race, Was Pivotal Factor in VA Elections

Jack White COMMENTARY - Real Clear Politics

Last week, Virginia voters elected three Republican servant leaders to statewide office. One happens to be a white male who has worked as a businessman in his native commonwealth. One is a black woman who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, later becoming a U.S. Marine. One is a first-generation American of Cuban descent who has spent the majority of his professional life in public service.

Of course, if you follow certain media outlets, you may not know that Winsome Sears (pictured) is Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, or that Jason Miyares is Virginia’s attorney general-elect. One MSNBC host saidin response to the results that “a good chunk of voters … are okay with white supremacy,” while Spotify host and Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill tweeted, “This country loves white supremacy.” That perspective misguidedly ignores the full scope of Old Dominion voters’ decisions last week.

As a black Virginian who sought the Republican nomination for attorney general earlier this year, I see the world differently from these pundits. I see a state where the white male, black immigrant female, and first-generation Hispanic male received almost exactly the same percentage and number of votes. I see a state where white voters who backed white Democrat Joe Biden last year swung to vote for diverse, highly qualified, principled Republican leadership.

I see in the Commonwealth of Virginia a state that represents our nation’s continuing maturation about race. A series of Gallup polls dug up by Just Facts found that the portion of white Southerners willing to vote for a black president rose from just 8% in 1958 to 95% in 1999. As explained by Gallup, 95% is “essentially universal willingness to state to an interviewer that the race of a candidate for president would make no difference.” 

It is very easy and dangerously wrong to point to race alone in voters’ decision-making. The more nuanced and factually correct observation is that Virginia voters chose statewide candidates who emphasized policies focused on opportunity, safety, and education, through principled lenses, in their respective campaigns.

Virginians voted on serious issues last week, involving individual determinations, economic implications, and matters that directly impact their families and communities. In that vein, voters considered candidates with very different approaches to addressing those issues.  Virginia, a Southern state, just proved to be a powerful case study in voters prioritizing policies, families, and our commonwealth’s future above identity politics, hatred and bigotry. Contrary to making decisions based on race, Virginians made decisions based on issues.

Some may choose to point to the 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, where a woman tragically died, as evidence of pervasive and persistent racism in our state and nation. However, a few hundred people gathered for that rally, which the Associated Press described at the time as the largest of its kind in the nation in a decade. Out of a nation of 330 million people, a few hundred gathered at the last gasp of white supremacy, which was roundly rejected by leaders and laypeople of both major parties, and which clearly played no role in electing a Republican black immigrant female and a first-generation Republican Hispanic man to statewide office last week.

As the son of two black parents who were raised and educated in the segregated South — parents who transcended impediments to realizing the American dream — I am unwilling to ignore the role that race and racism have played in the narrative of our nation in general and Virginia in particular. We cannot turn a blind eye to history. But, as a U.S. Army veteran committed to the furtherance of American values, I also know how far we have come. Time spent looking through the windshield instead of the rearview mirror helps all of us get to our destination of a commonwealth that is more in line with the principles upon which this nation was founded.

Indeed, the racism that I see is that which declares Americans must identify by race — not as Americans, as Virginians, or as common members of the human race. This is the position of those who falsely declare that white people are inherently evil, and that we should vote based on race — not on the merits of those running for office. Virginians wisely chose merit last week, not race.

Jack White is a U.S. Army veteran, a West Point graduate, and a former Supreme Court clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. who practices law in Northern Virginia.