[rayiner]

> I've long felt that our public institutions should roughly reflect the racial and gender makeup of the country.

How do you reconcile that with democracy? Consider gender for example. My mom has a strong preference for male elected officials. She’s no bumpkin—she has a master’s degree in chemistry. She simply embraces that aspect of traditional gender roles. This isn’t an uncommon view—women make up the majority of voters nearly everywhere, but most legislators are still men.

Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?

Also, isn’t there an underlying contradiction in your position? In your view, is an Asian person fungible with a white person? If not—if you think an Asian maybe might bring an “Asian perspective” to the job, or give special attention to “Asian issues”—why isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

[hkhanna]

> Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?

No, and I would not presume to do so. I am only expressing my view that, over time, these preferences would counterbalance each other in a way that results in a distribution in our institutions that broadly reflects the demographics of society.

You mom has a preference for male elected officials. But maybe my dad has a preference for female elected officials. My comment isn't intended to reflect negatively or positively on any of that, I hope you see. It's only a theory about population-level preferences as applied to our public institutions.

I'm not suggesting anything normative, just describing what an equitable society might look like and why an all-black Senate for some period would not be unrepresentative when representation is aggregated over years and not just seats or states.

> [W]hy isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?

I am not saying anything is not appropriate. I think my main point didn't get through.

The core of what I'm saying is that when looking at representation in a public institution, it's useful to take into account the history of that institution and how it has been constituted _over time_ rather than just in the present.

[rayiner]

Your assumption that the race and gender distribution of the legislature should reflect that of the overall population rests on a normative principle. My point is that normative principle is in tension with democratic principles.

For example, if it is your position that the race of a legislator matters--that one can expect a black or asian senator to do something differently than a white senator--then it is entirely rational for individual voters to prefer representatives of their own race. And in a white-majority society like the U.S., where minorities are geographically distributed amongst a white majority, that means that almost all legislators will be white. Any effort to rebalance that racial distribution would be in tension with the will and self interest of the voters.