Last night, a 60%-black Memphis congressional district re-elected its one-term white liberal incumbent, Steve Cohen, despite TV ads by his black challenger Nikki Tinker that associated him falsely with the Klan and asked why Cohen would "pray in our churches" while voting against mandatory prayer in public schools.

Cohen had won in 2006 with only 31% of the vote, probably because several black challengers split the remainder. But last night, given two years to prove himself an effective representative, he won 79 - 19%.

Does anyone realize how important, and beautiful, this is? Emily's List didn't, as M.J. showed here, until it finally shook off its identity politics and saw that not every female candidate is better than every male. Barack Obama was cagey and quiet on this one, and thereby hangs a tale.

More than a decade ago, in Liberal Racism and this New Republic article, among others, I tried to persuade liberals how important and valuable it was that white-majority electorates in several Southern congressional districts had just elected blacks, in the 1996 elections.

The civil-rights establishment refused to believe that it had even happened. Obama, teaching about racial districting then at the University of Chicago, read my arguments but never mentioned them in class. (Yesterday, belatedly, he did condemn Tinker's odious ads but didn't make an endorsement.)

The root of the problem of racial districting that recapitulates racism itself was the defensiveness of voting-rights activists, black and white. Having struggled so bravely to pass the Voting Rights Act in the teeth of the more racist, segregationist America of the 1960s, many still cling to the assumption that people will vote only in racial blocs and that, therefore, no black can go to Congress unless districts are drawn to ensure heavy black majorities.

The original Voting Right Act recognized the hard realities of racism without inflating them to the point of making them worse. Passed in 1965, it stopped white machine bosses (usually Democrats) from dividing up existing, contiguous black communities like Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant that were large enough to hold their own congressional disticts. Instead of allowing such districts, the party bosses put pieces of the black community into three or four different mostly-white congressional districts to keep black voters from sending a black candidate to Congress. Thanks to the 1965 VRA, finally a "black" district was created in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which Shirley Chisholm won in 1968.

The 1982 Amendments went too far beyond this. They say, in effect, "If, by any stretch of the imagination, you can link together any black (or Hispanic) enclaves, however small, far-flung, and otherwise unrelated to one another, to concoct a heavily black or Hispanic district, you MUST do so."

The people packed into these new, convoluted districts often have so little in common with one another -- they live in bits and corners of dozens of different school districts, counties, etc. -- that the congressional districts really have no unifying public business. Nor suprisingly, their voter turnouts are terribly low, and the incumbents tend to hold onto their seats amid apathy. It is hard for a new candidate from one enclave of these far-flung, crazy districts to get enough traction in the other parts, where he or she isn't known, to challenge the incumbent, This has only increased voter apathy.

Sure, the incumbent is black, or Hispanic, and installed "forever." But what, really, is the gain? Some of these districts have become "rotten boroughs," not centers of empowerment or democratic vitality. I described this in New York City in Liberal Racism.

Worse, the creation of districts like this only whitened the neighboring districts around them, allowing new Republican challengers to replace the white Democrats who'd been moderate because, under the old configurations, they'd had to answer to more than few black or Hispanic voters as well as white ones. Now, they no longer did. Congress got a few more black representatives (not many), and a lot more white Republicans, along with Speaker Newt Gingrich. Congratulations, race industry!

In their ivory towers, law professors like Pamela Karlan who championed these ideologically, penitentially driven recapitulations of racism concluded from the results that racism must be rising -- especially when, in 1995, Supreme Court majorities, thanks to Sandra Day O'Connor, invalidated seven of the racially drawn districts as the absurdities they were, thereby forcing their new black incumbents to run for re-election in newly drawn districts that were no longer majority black.

Howls of outrage and prophecies of doom came from many of Obama's colleagues in the law schools and from his future friend Deval Patrick, now governor of Massachusetts but then Bill Clinton's assistant attorney general for civil rights.

The New York Times, under editorial-page editor Howell Raines, a penitential Southerner, raged at the Court's supposed attack on voting rights and invoked the specters of segregation. (Yes, the self-righteous Raines set the Times back on race in more ways than one.)

Then election day came in 1996. Five black incumbents whose districts had been invalidated by the Court decided to run again anyway, in majority white or majority white-and-Hispanic districts, in the South. And they all won.

In those elections, it was white voters who discredited the race industry's assumptions of racist bloc voting; last night, black voters did the same, for the umpteenth time, but in an especially dramatic way, given Tinker's ads. They defied both racial demagoguery and the presumptions of their self-appointed caretakers in the race industry, who keep on drawing these districts to allow black voters to elect what the law euphemistically calls, "candidates of their choice." Well, they did choose. Again. Get it yet?

We'll see. In 1996, in a series of almost hilarious denials, the black incumbents' victories were dismissed as flukes by law professors like Karlan (who is still holding out) and by the Times. (Last night's victory was covered by the Times in a story buried in the Politics Page, not in my print edition, where it didn't appear at all, but online. Had a white candidate run racist ads against a black candidate analogous to the ones Tinker ran against Cohen, the story would have made Page 1).

The best quick account of how voters defied this absurdity in 1996 is this article I wrote at the time. (The pdf may take a minute to come up, but it's worth the wait.) The most effective detailed exposition of what's at stake is Chapter 3. "Voting Wrongs," of my Liberal Racism.

Finally, some professors and activists are coming around, notably the scholar of voting rights Richard H. Pildes of New York University Law School, who has a short, smart reassessment of the Voting Rights Act's amendments in the Yale Law Journal.

I don't suggest that the ubiquity and relentlessness of racism have ended. Part of the problem is actuarial: Obama may lose -- or win only in a squeaker -- because many whites who are still able to make it to the polls will not, under any circumstances, vote for a black. He could also lose for the subtler reason that even those who consider themselves beyond such racism remain captive to racist stereotypes that help them rationalize the doubts sown by the Republicans' negative ads.

But Obama would never have become the Democratic nominee at all, especially
against the formidable Hillary Clinton, if a growing part of this country weren't ready for change on this front. Last night's election in a majority-black district in Memphis confirms this just as fully as Obama's victory in Iowa did at the start of this year and as five black incumbents' victories in the South confirmed twelve years ago.

For Obama, an endorsement of Cohen would have been win-win-win: He'd have turned a lot of white heads in the South; he'd have scored big points with Jews who cared that Cohen is Jewish and were outraged by those Klan photos; and he wouldn't have lost any black votes to speak of, although undoubtedly some feathers would have been ruffled, even among blacks who themselves rejected Tinker and voted for Cohen.

Even so, he'd have picked up more votes than he'd have lost. So I wish that he had shown the courage of black Memphis voters' convictions by endorsing Cohen against the trapped and odious Tinker, just as he undoubtedly cheered the black incumbents' victories at white hands in 1996.