The defeat of a racist gerrymander is a victory — and a stark reminder that shaking Asheville’s status quo takes a lot more than elections
Late last month, amid a growing public backlash, Asheville City Council voted 6-1 to repeal most of a state-imposed gerrymander of local elections. The measure had carved the city up, putting five out of six Council seats into GOP-drawn districts, delaying elections by a year and ending the city’s primaries. It was clearly a response to increasing Black voter turnout and a more left-leaning electorate over the past four years.
Importantly, the gerrymander also drew support from establishment Democrats — most prominently state Sen. Terry Van Duyn — fine with pushing elections in a whiter, more conservative direction as long as it staved off growing outrage over gentrification and segregation in this supposedly progressive town. That meant that even most of the city’s liberals and non-profits did absolutely nothing (Van Duyn is, not coincidentally, a major philanthropist). After the legislation was passed last year, neither did most Council members. Even the ones who had condemned the gerrymander stayed silent as the months went by.
In the end it wasn’t up to them. Sustained outrage — Ashevillians showed up at almost every Council meeting this year to express their anger about Council’s inaction in no uncertain terms — prevailed. Starting in January they publicly pressed for the gerrymander’s end. By this summer more critical Council members finally broke their silence and more anger emerged at a public forum on the issue.
Even fairly centrist Council members who had spent months dismissing any chance of challenging the gerrymander (and gave themselves another year in office in the process) in the end voted to repeal it, reinstating Asheville’s citywide system and non-partisan primaries. The only exception was Council member Vijay Kapoor, who turned coat and supported keeping the GOP gerrymander. Now candidates, including some locals who fought against the state districts, are declaring their runs for office.
Yet this isn’t a pre-election analysis piece, because the most important lessons from this fight show that if locals want to seriously build a city that most of us can actually live in, we need to think about a lot more than the ballot box.
The replacement of the citywide election system with carved-up districts drawn by a far-right legislature would have meant an even more insulated and rapacious City Hall.
While there’s no such creature as a legitimate government — local or otherwise — elections can be one front to reduce harm and pick enemies. In recent years, outrage over the state of Asheville had started to bubble up, shaking the traditional lock on power just a bit. The devil’s bargain between the far-right and the local liberal establishment happened for a reason. Given that, the defeat of the gerrymander by tenacious Ashevillians is a real victory.
But this battle also revealed some stark lessons about the lengths to which Asheville’s status quo will go to keep its lock on power — and the ways it might be stopped.
City Hall is not yours
City Hall is not meant for the people of Asheville. Council’s cramped 1920s chambers with fasces on the door and an array of racist paintings on the walls sends that message as loudly as the cops flanking the audience. The burying of policies in jargon, indecipherable process and the constant chiding of locals to be quiet and not expect too much much completes it.
The gerrymander made that clearer than ever. Locals had done what they were ostensibly supposed to do. The 2015 and 2017 elections had seen the end of an all-white Council, the final wipe-out of far-right local politicians (none made it pass the 2015 primary) and the most Black representation on Council in three decades. Issues around policing, gentrification and structural racism emerged front-and-center. Voter turnout shot up. It’s not coincidence that state bills to change Asheville’s local election system started in 2016 and continued for the next two years.
During the 2017 election (where 75 percent of those who turned out to vote rejected the GOP district scheme in a referendum) the “progressives” who’d run City Hall for over a decade started to feel real pressure and lose seats. So Van Duyn and the Democratic establishment suddenly found common ground with the legislature whose election-rigging they had previously condemned.
The message was clear: even if you play by the rules, they’ll just change them rather than face even mild pressure. Liberals will even happily team up with the far-right and ignore the overwhelming will of the voters to do so.
Fortunately, in fighting to reverse the gerrymander, locals stopped playing by the rules. If they had waited for another election, pleaded with state politicians for new legislation or gone through some sort of stage-managed city process, they would have lost badly.
But instead of polite pleading, relentless anger was a lot more common. Instead of just focusing on a single issue, they tied the gerrymander into other dangers Ashevillians were facing. While locals from trans activists to civil rights veterans did repeatedly show up to condemn the gerrymander, no single leader or spokesperson emerged, or had to.
In the process, they pushed back on other fronts as well. Mayor Esther Manheimer had repeatedly invoked a “no clapping” rule (backed by police intimidation, naturally) against those in the audience who made any sort of noise in support of criticisms against the status quo. During the gerrymander fight locals pointedly broke this rule — which Manheimer had made up — en masse and called her bluff. They won, and Council’s ability to control the room and intimidate the audience slipped accordingly.
In the course of nine months reversing the gerrymander went from an issue Council wouldn’t talk about to one they kept delaying, to denying any action was possible, to a matter for debate, to something almost all of them voted to approve.
This wasn’t the first time. Repeatedly, rage has worked where process and politeness failed. Former APD Chief Tammy Hooper — a blatant racist even by that department’s miserable standards — maintained public support from a majority of Council and plenty of prominent local non-profits. Late last year, she was ousted anyway in the face of ongoing community anger, especially from Black and queer locals. At the beginning of this year, a hotel moratorium was considered a fanciful, crazy idea. Council passed it unanimously in September because the more pro-hotelier members were having to face the fact that almost everyone hates them.
The gerrymander fight, and those examples, show that even in City Hall, direct anger works a lot more effectively than any process the city will ever come up with. That’s worth keeping in mind as campaign season heats up.
There is a world elsewhere
I’m not saying don’t vote (reducing harm and picking enemies is worth doing) but I am saying that the way Ashevillians, even fairly left-leaning ones, have been taught to think about politics is a sure way to defeat.
According to this method there’s some fairly genteel public pressure campaigns backed by non-profits (the city usually ignores these). Some of those non-profit types (or the occasional “progressive” business owner) sometimes go on to run for office. They get elected and hopefully those city input processes suddenly start meaning something. At some point, the array of people long ignored by City Hall (Black communities, transit riders, the tens of thousands that can barely afford housing) will supposedly get something, somehow added to public policy plans. Then city staff will support them and Council will vote them through.
It’s false, of course. If these methods worked, they would have done so at some point during the last decade-plus of brutal gentrification. The city bureaucracy is very conservative, very entrenched and very contemptuous of the public. So far there’s never been a Council willing to seriously challenge them, partly because a lot of Council agrees with them. Mainstream non-profits face legal limitations, boards packed with the white and wealthy and a culture of conciliation.
So politicians get elected on platforms of challenging the police only to vote for hiring more of them. They echo the public’s outrage against hotels, then approve them anyway. We’ve recently seen the city ignore its own plans on transit and Council’s direct orders on reining in the police department.
The only time any of the things the public hates get checked is due to public outrage, organized not just outside the official channels, but in defiance of them.
Because the point of the local political process — and much of the non-profit complex too — isn’t to enact change, it’s to contain and defeat it. If locals do end up finding some opening, at the ballot box or elsewhere, to push something through, suddenly the rules change again.
The gerrymander fight showed that crystal clear. If the local political establishment is willing to team up with the far-right, ignore 75 percent of Asheville voters and cancel elections for a whole year they’ll do damn near anything. Public anger, after a long fight, was the only thing that stopped them.
But anger and a willingness to defy the status quo is a beginning, not an end.
Realize that your vote is not your voice. Your voice is your voice. So more than who’s running for office or which non-profit to donate to, think about how to build far more directly on the ground. Ad-hoc networks — often growing from groups of friends and neighbors — already fight to keep people here housed, fed and safe.. Strengthening those — and fostering more coordination between them — would create a lasting source of power and support. Ashevillians already get mutual aid, by whatever name, more than almost any other city I’ve seen. We have to, it’s the reason a lot of us are still here.
Unions, community defense, eviction prevention, direct opposition and much more are where the focus needs to turn. While these things have always been present in Asheville, the political culture I’ve mentioned above has consistently discouraged them. A lot more people need to start taking them a lot more seriously, because any temporary gains made in systems set up to be hostile to us are precarious at best.
Too often I’ve seen promising grassroots pushes dispersed, once-capable activists defanged and interesting initiatives outright co-opted because they took this city’s status quo at its word. Because that’s the point of it. So it’s time for Asheville to build power directly in our own backyards and to enter City Hall not to plead, but to open cracks in the walls of an old and awful fortress.
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