Don Jorovsky writes: > If people were truly elected solely on merit, and identity never mattered, > then blacks, hispanics, gays, etc., would be elected randomly around the > country to all sorts of offices, and while their number would not > necessarily rigidly adhere to their percentage of the population, there > would be some kind of resemblance. > > Guess what? They're not! <snip> The east side of St. Paul just > elected the first Hmong legislator in the nation... do you think Moua would > have been elected in Mora? <snip> And women still make up only about ten or twelve percent of the US House and > Senate.... so even though women make up over 50% of the US population,
Yes, but to get this back to **Minneapolis** <grin>, we need to parse the facts about under-represented groups a bit more closely to assess local impacts. For example, women, as a group, have been **over-represented* in Minneapolis electoral positions for eight of the last nine years: we just ended an era with women made up 100% of the mayor's office and 62% of the council. Women became the electoral majority in 1993, held it in 1997. The lost it in 2001, and now 0% of the mayor's office and 31% of the council. Since women in effect "won" two of the last three elections, you can't say they Minneapolis face a U.S. Congress-like situation. (By the way, women still make up a majority of the city's legislative delegation - 56 percent or 9 of 16 if you don't count Richfield's Mark Gleason, who has a sliver of the city. If you do, women have 53% of the legislative seats.) Still, I'm a person who believes you can't claim much progress against discrimination at least until you've elected the second person/class of a previously under-represented group. So I acknowledge that while women have not recently been electorally oppressed in Minneapolis, I'll be completely convinced when a woman returns to the mayor's office and the council majority. Many of us know the story with gay/lesbian representatives: right now, they *might* be over-represented at the council level - 3 of 13 or 23 percent. [Do we have any solid estimates on the gay/lesbian percentage of the city's population?] 2 of the 16 legislators are gay/lesbian, or 12 percent. But there's never been an out gay mayor. And the council thing is only a few months old. So gays have broken through, but with no evidence that orientation-blindness is a fixture, or a fluke. Everyone knows minorities are under-represented. Non-whites make up 35 percent Minneapolis's population yet there is, and has only ever been, 1 of 13 council reps, or 8 percent. (Sorry, Robert Lilligren - I'm rounding down from your one-eighth Native American.) 2 of the 16 Minneapolis legislators are minority, or 12 percent. The mayor's office has been "over-represented" in recent years, but again, without a repeat it's hard to know if that was a fluke. Given the city's minority population and inability to elect minorities elsewhere, the evidence leans toward fluke. So in short, Minneapolis women cannot claim to be under-represented over the past decade, gays can't but only for the last few months, and minority complaints (except for the mayor's office) are real and persistent. David Brauer King Field - Ward 10 Minneapolis Redistricting Geek - see http://members.tcq.net/david/index.htm _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
