The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) left minority candidates, voters, and issues as unequal as ever. Although new reforms such as expenditure limitations and public financing are afoot and portent a better reckoning with equality concerns, the experience under BCRA highlights a truth that spoke even before BCRA’s enactment: minority political empowerment—whether from the standpoint of the election of minority candidates, get out the vote drives, or the engagement of minority concerns during elections—has long been too dependent on white money.

      The minority voting rights movement, under continuing attack from Shaw v. Reno and facing the challenge of re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has yet to rectify this troubling paradox of its movement. The movement’s focus on autonomy—the election of minority candidates without dependence under white votes—is difficult to reconcile with minority candidates’ reliance on white dollars to finance their campaigns. No less contradictory is the effort to evaluate all candidates’ commitment to a minority-supported agenda when that agenda is often silenced during the campaign because of candidates’ preoccupation with the median voter and relative paucity of independent expenditures devoted to minority issues. The common refrain to these observations is the plea of inequality: those who have less give less and are heard less. I think this argument is indisputable and that inequality will persist in the absence of reforms such as expenditure limitations and public financing. Inequality and agency, however, can and do exist simultaneously in campaign finance law.

      A type of agency, in the representation or virtual representation sense, exists in minority voters’ reliance on candidates support but not funded by them to represent their interests. Yet a different kind of agency, agency that focuses on minority voters’ capacity for self-help and independent action, has been largely unrealized. One reason agency in the empowering sense is so lacking is that minority voters have failed to critically assess their relationship with consumerism, which enriches political opponents by diverting resources to corporations and their owners that could otherwise be invested in minority voters’ own political capital. What is needed is a mass re-orientation of thought regarding the worth of politics and the perils of disengagement. The gravamen of this re-education project must be the exhortation that politics has consequences for the everyday lives of people of color and should therefore be part of the bundle of goods to which their spending power is directed.