SWEET DEMON ALABAMA: Secrets of Alabama’s Black Belt!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2015

Part 4—We start to get the tale wrong: Aloysius O’Donnell—not his real name—is a fictional major league shortstop.

He’s in the running for this year’s Golden Glove award in his league, which remains undisclosed. At the plate, he hit .203, with very few walks, only six steals, and 10 home runs (“ding-dongs,” “taters”).

O’Donnell isn’t real strong at the plate (at the “dish”). Having said that, suppose this:

Suppose we show you a highlight reel which features O’Donnell’s home runs—and nothing else. You hear the excited home run calls of his team’s partisan broadcasters. You see him mobbed by teammates in the dugout. You may not realize that his teammates were behaving semi-ironically on a few occasions.

From watching that highlight reel, an unsuspecting fan may get the impression that O’Donnell carries a “big stick.” That’s especially possible if the highlight reel ends with a flatly false statement—with a statement like this:

“Out of all God’s great green evolving earth, Alabama Republicans really did manage to pick this one spot, this center of African-American life in their state, in the Black Belt, as the place where they could really save some money by cutting all those offices where you get what you need to vote.”

That stirring statement is flatly false. As we noted yesterday, it’s the way Rachel Maddow ended an October 2 report about an important topic.

Alas! We the people can get misled (“royally conned”) if we’re handed selective information—information which has been “cherry-picked.” We’re especially likely to get misled if the selective information is helped along by statements which are flatly false—and if the cherry-picking is being performed in support of a treasured old theme.

That’s what happened in a recent, ongoing episode involving Alabama’s decision to close 31 driver’s license offices in 30 counties, a move which left 28 counties without a place to get a driver’s license.

We the liberals were told by our leaders that the state had aimed these closings at black Alabamians, in an attempt to keep such folk from voting.

The claim is pleasing, but it’s hard to square with the facts. Perhaps for the reason, we were exposed to a limited set of the facts.

On the brighter side, the cherry-picking to which we were exposed deserves a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. By the time the tale reached the Maddow Show, we were getting severely misled and flatly misinformed.

The episode provides a useful warning: Despite our obvious moral greatness, we liberals can be pitiful ditto-heads too! At a time of increasingly partisan media, we can be misled by our own superstars too, even about the most important topics.

This episode belongs in The Cherry-Pick Hall of Fame. It started with a pair of columns in the Birmingham News. On September 30, the columns appeared on-line within twelve minutes of each other.

We assume the columnists were well-intentioned. For the most part, they avoided statements which were flatly false.

That said, were their columns perhaps misleading? To us, it seems they were.

That said, the real problem began when national scribes began picking and choosing facts from these columns—at TPM, at Slate, and then on the Maddow Show. In our view, the results were grossly misleading—and flatly false statements were made. Maddow misstated the most.

Our story begins on September 30. At AL.com, Kyle Whitmire’s column went on-line at 3:55 P.M.

In part, the column said this:

WHITMIRE (9/30/15): In 2011, Alabama lawmakers approved the state's voter ID law, making it illegal to vote in Alabama without a government-issued photo ID.

For most folks, that's a driver's license.

[...]

Look at the list of counties now where you can't get a driver's license. There's Choctaw, Sumter, Hale, Greene, Perry, Wilcox, Lowndes, Butler, Crenshaw, Macon, Bullock—

Depending on which counties you count as being in Alabama’s Black Belt, either twelve or fifteen Black Belt counties soon won’t have a place to get a driver’s license.

Counties where some of the state’s poorest live.

Counties that are majority African-American.

Columnist, please! Just like that, the problem had begun.

Much of what Whitmire said in that passage was accurate. Two examples: Crenshaw County is in the Black Belt, and it did lose its office.

That said, Crenshaw County is majority white—more so than Alabama as a whole! In the 2010 census, it was 72.6% white, 23.4% black.

(Alabama was 67.0% white, 26.2% black.)

Butler County and Choctaw County are also majority white. It might be time for some basic info about Alabama’s “Black Belt.”

Uh-oh! Many of Alabama’s Black Belt counties are not majority black.

“Depending on the way you count,” there are eighteen definite Black Belt counties. If you count a different way, there are as many as 24.

Despite what you may have thought you read in Whitmire's column, only eleven of those 24 counties were majority black in the 2010 census. And only eight of those eleven counties lost their driver’s license offices in the recent jack-booted purge.

That may be eight too many; that's a matter of judgment, and there may be much more to say. But Whitmire was already having number problems as he presented his case.

Is it true that “fifteen Black Belt counties” lost their driver’s license offices? To get his number that high, Whitmire had to include seven counties which aren’t majority black. He was even including the one shown below—and no, we aren’t making this up:

Lamar County: 86.7% white, 11.3% black

It could still be true! It could still be true that this region’s black voters were disproportionally and/or unwisely affected by the office closings. But we’re already dealing with fuzzy math. And another key point must be made:

Of the eighteen definite Black Belt counties, eleven were majority black in the 2010 census. But here’s an important fact in the overall picture:

Most of those counties are rural counties with very small populations! Within their borders, the people who are inconvenienced will be majority black. But they represent a tiny portion of Alabama’s black population.

How small are the counties Whitmire named? Greene County has a population of 9,045!

Here’s the list of the majority black counties which lost their offices. Overall, the population of Alabama is 4.8 million:

Population of majority-black “Black Belt” counties which lost their offices
Macon County: 21,452
Hale County: 15,760
Sumter County: 13,763
Wilcox County: 11,670
Lowndes County: 11,299
Bullock County: 10,914
Perry County: 10,591
Greene County: 9,045

Larger majority-black Black Belt counties retained their offices. That includes Montgomery County (229,363) and Dallas County (43,820), where many more black voters live.

It would be better if every county retained the service in question. Reportedly, the state is now seeking a way to restore the shuttered offices.

That said, looking only at these small counties is a bit like watching a tape of O’Donnell’s ten home runs. It keeps us from seeing the broader picture of the way these closings worked across the state.

Offices were closed all over the state, not just in small Black Belt counties. By our count, the population of the 28 affected counties is 28.2% black, based on figures from the 2010 census.

In that census, the state of Alabama was 26.2% black. You really shouldn’t tell this story without including some such numbers, especially if you plan to say something like this:

“Out of all God’s great green evolving earth, Alabama Republicans really did manage to pick this one spot, this center of African-American life in their state, in the Black Belt, as the place where they could really save some money by cutting all those offices where you get what you need to vote.”

Multimillionaire TV star, please! That's just baldly false.

Vassals, can we talk? If you watch the tape of O’Donnell’s home runs, you may get a distorted picture of his overall hitting. If you’re only told about small Black Belt counties, you may get a distorted sense of the way these office closings affected Alabama’s full population.

Those eight smaller Black Belt counties are majority black—but they include a very small percentage of Alabama’s black population. If you aren’t allowed to know such things, we’ll suggest you’re being grossly misled, possibly even conned.

One additional basic fact was missing from Whitmire’s column. In Alabama, voters don’t need a driver’s license to vote.

They can get a free photo voter ID at all 67 county seats. That wasn’t affected by these office closings. Unless you're just trying to please the base, you really can’t tell this story without including that fact.

In our view, Whitmire’s column had some obvious problems. He seemed to change some counties from white to black. He omitted numerical context and a basic fact.

Twelve minutes later, John Archibald’s column appeared on-line; it took matters quite a bit further. Slate, TPM and the Maddow Show were soon working from its facts and embellishing them even further.

They told us a story we very much like. In the process, we liberals got misled about an important matter.

On the bright side, it made us love Rachel even more. She told us a story we very much liked, as Sean has long done for The Others.

It hardened us in our tribal identity. Down through the war-ravaged annals of time, the tribe has always felt good!

Tomorrow: We try to cram in a whole lot