On Wednesday, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court dealt a death blow to the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the effects test, making it nearly impossible to challenge redistricting schemes that deliberately disenfranchise Black voters. Justice Elena Keagan began her dissent by describing a hypothetical Black district that typically elects a Democratic representative, surrounded by all white districts that always elect Republicans. As Justice Kagan explained, the majority’s opinion now makes it permissible for a state legislature to divide the sole Black district into pieces and distribute its voters to the surrounding white districts, with the result that “Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted,” (Louisiana v. Callais, dissent of Kagan, J. at 2).
Given the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, (588 U.S.684(2019)), holding that the Supreme Court was powerless to strike down partisan gerrymandering, and the complete capture of the Republican Party by authoritarian white nationalists, Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais renders the most consequential civil rights legislation of our time effectively dead letter.
It is impossible to overstate what a gut punch this decision is to Black people. The VRA is single-handedly responsible for increasing the number of Black people in Congress from less than ten in the century after The Civil War to 63 today. In what election law expert, Rick Hasen dubbed a cowardly opinion, Justice Samuel Alito spit on the graves of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Reverend James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jonathan Daniels, and countless other activists who were murdered or brutalized pursuing voting rights for Black people.
It is no exaggeration to say that this decision has the potential to turn back the clock to the Jim Crow era, when the Black people who comprised between 30-50% of the population of Southern states had no representation and were subject to the arbitrary and capricious whims of a malignantly hostile white majority. In their zeal to disenfranchise Black voters Alabama and Tennessee are already rushing to redistrict, and Louisiana’s governor suspended an election that was already underway.
Wednesday’s decision is of a piece with this regime’s wholesale, multifaceted attack on Black people. Consider the fact that 54%of the women who lost jobs in the first year of the Trump administration were Black women, the purge of Black officers from the military, the repeated attempt by Trump and his allies at the state level to ban Black history to erase any evidence of Black achievement and denigrate any Black person in a position of authority, from pilot to Supreme Court justice, as inherently undeserving and unqualified, by virtue of skin color. All of this erasure is designed to convince the public that Black people belong where racists want to put us, permanently at the bottom of the social hierarchy in this country, with no rights, stature or public presence.
The truth is, America could never have achieved its position as a global superpower without the myriad contributions of Black people. I’m not talking merely about the centuries of stolen physical labor, but about the inventions and innovations that power modern life, from electric street lights to Voice over Internet Protocol, to the soundtrack of American life, from Bessie’s blues, to Monk’s bebop, to Kendrick’s Pulitzer-worthy raps, to the cuisine that literally first gave this country flavor. The architects of Black persecution, like Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts, who wrote both his masters and PhD theses on African American history, know this. You should ask yourself why you don’t and whose purpose that ignorance serves. Just be warned- they may come for Black people first, but we will not be last. Conduct yourself accordingly.
Btw, my book full of the receipts of Black American brilliance, “Our Minds Were Always Free” drops May 19th. Pre-order link : https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/our-minds-were-always-free-a-history-of-how-black-brilliance-was-exploited-and-the-fight-to-retake-control-lisa-e-davis/7a3a89c4bacab92a?ean=9781982175993&next=t&
Brava! Lisa. Thank you and literally cannot wait for the book drop.