by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com Columnist
The news that the Justice Department has filed a vote discrimination lawsuit against Black Americans in Noxubee County, Mississippi for of all things suppressing White votes has raised eyebrows.

The novel suit, which is believed to be one of the first of its kind in which Black Americans were explicitly accused of using illegal tactics to boot White Americans from the polls, seemed laughable if not downright absurd.

For nearly a century, Mississippi White people used every trick in the book from intimidation to physical violence to keep Black Americans from the polls.

The lawsuit seemed even more absurd given the well-documented reports of continued voter intimidation and suppression against Black voters.

The NAACP, a legion of citizen watchdog groups, People For the American Way, and Democrats have filed lawsuits in Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and other states claiming vote fraud before and after the 2004 presidential elections

There is no smoking gun proof that the Bush Justice Department systematically subverted the enforcement provisions of the voting rights act to diminish Black political strength and bolster the Republicans.

But Bush did not aggressively fight to implement the Help America Vote Act of 2002, or lobby Congress to speed up funding for the initiative.

Republican voter groups were caught red-handed in Oregon and Nevada dumping Democratic voter registrations.

Republican registrars have limited the number of ballots, and have cut back the number of polling places in heavily Black neighborhoods, and have rejected thousands of applications on the most spurious technical grounds. The Justice Department has taken no action in these cases.

But the Department has taken action against Noxubee County Black Americans. And it should have.

Black Americans outnumber White Americans 3 to 1 in the county. The crushing numbers advantage guarantees that they’d dominate county politics in a fair election.

Instead, says the Justice Department, the Black chair of the county Democratic Party choses to cheat to disfranchise White Americans by intimidation, bribery, falsifying and manipulating absentee ballots and even importing Black outsiders to run for office.

If White Americans had used the same tactics, Black Americans would have loudly screamed foul, and demanded that the Justice Department take action.

They didn’t and haven’t in part because of their fierce loathing of the Bush Administration, and in part from their deep suspicion that the Justice Department is using the lawsuit as yet another ploy to diminish Black voting strength.

The caution and silence is understandable, but this walking on racial eggshells leaves Black Americans prone to the charge that they propagate double standards on race.

That is that when a White commits a racially offensive act they rush to condemn it, but are silent when a Black American does the same thing.

That swings the door open even wider for Black Americans that commit crimes or inappropriate acts to finger-point White Americans for their misdeeds, and thereby divert attention from their wayward acts, or even get support and sympathy for them.

The endless line of Black politicians, ministers and sports icons know the drill well. Whenever they are accused of or are nailed for sexual hijinks, bribery, corruption, drug dealing and even murder they reflexively shout that they are victims of a racist conspiracy.

It’s a well-worn tact but it’s a sure-fire crowd pleaser because many Black Americans are conditioned to believe that anything White Americans do or say toward and about them is malicious.

The problem with this is that the victims of the misdeeds of Black miscreants are almost always other Black people. That’s true with the flap in Noxubee County.

Though White people are the target of voting abuses, Black voters now are forced to take the heat from the Justice Department. The department will be hawk like in watching for any sign, real or imagined, that Black Americans have abused the voting process there. State officials, in turn, will keep a sharp eye on voting procedures.

The state’s Democratic Party will keep Black county officials at arms length.

The press will finger point Noxubee, County as the poster symbol of political corruption.

The implicit meaning is that when Black Americans grab political power in Southern state’s counties they are just as prone as White peopel to bend, twist and subvert the political process.

The ultimate winner is the Bush Administration. The suit deflects attention from the Justice Department’s see no evil, hear no evil against accusations that Republicans have suppressed the Black vote in the South and the Latino and American Indian vote in other states.

It boosts the Justice Department image as an even handed enforcer of the voting rights laws.

With mid-term elections weeks away, and with Republicans and Democrats locked in intense battles for Senate and House seats in some states, the issue of Black voter suppression almost certainly will again be a hot issue in some places.

The vote muddle in Noxubee County makes it that much harder to sell the notion that Black Americans, not White Americans, are still the prime target of voter suppression.

BlackNews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of "The Emerging Black GOP Majority" (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and The GOP’s court of Black voters. For order information, see www.blackgopbook.com.