Florida state Representative Janet Adkins (R) clearly knew she was saying something truly terrible during a private meeting with her fellow members of the North Florida Republican caucus because she double-checked to see if any reporters were in the room.
“Let me give you inside ball game. Are there any reporters in here?” she said. “Any reporters? OK. So, inside ball game.”
This must be one of those "quiet rooms" Mitt Romney talked about.
“You draw [Corrine Brown's seat] in such a fashion so perhaps, a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote,” said Adkins, a Nassau County Republican, referring to black residents. [...]
Adkins directly addressed Danny Norton, the state GOP committeeman from Baker County, which includes a large prison population.
“You can actually, Danny, you — you can be the person that will help get rid of Corrine Brown,” she said.
Here you have a white Republican calling on her colleagues to gerrymander a black Democrat's district and fill it with a population of mostly black prisoners who cannot vote.
This is real, institutional racism. It's the fine print of an oppressive system grinding its gears against black Americans and their representation in government.
It's an acknowledgement that black Americans are disproportionately and systematically disenfranchised by the so-called justice system and, rather than resolving to fix the system, Representative Adkins wants to use it to the Republican party's electoral advantage.
This is the kind of everyday racism that presumably occurs with alarming frequency which we don't see in public. The only reason we're reading about it today is because an audio recording of this "inside ball game" meeting was obtained by Politico Florida.
The proposed district lines for Representative Corrine Brown's district would reportedly include 18 prisons.