, the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority dealt a 

Voting Rights Act of 1965, clearing the way for a reversal of Black electoral power the likes of which we have not experienced in our lifetimes and from which we are not likely to recover anytime soon. Widely recognized as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, the law was designed to enforce the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee under the 15th Amendment that no government can deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Generations of Black people struggled and sacrificed — 

 — in the face of Jim Crow terror to finally achieve protections for voting rights that were already guaranteed under the Constitution.

Since its enactment, the law has been used to challenge and often eliminate restrictions on voting used by states across the South during the Jim Crow era to lock in a white supremacist hierarchy based on racial caste. It achieved nothing short of a 

. Just one year after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the 

 had risen from 11 percent a decade earlier to 51 percent in Alabama and from 27 percent to 72 percent in Tennessee over the same time period.

There were six Black members of the House of Representatives and no Black senators when the law was enacted.

That grew to 21 as of the start of Congress’s new term in 1985 and 63 by 2025, along with five Black U.S. senators. The 

. The Supreme Court decision in Callais not only forecloses future progress; it threatens to impose the conditions of a pre–civil rights past.

 learned a long time ago that one of the best ways to understand what the Supreme Court has decided in a case is to read the dissent. The dissent in Callais, written by Justice Elena Kagan and

joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, plainly explains how the Supreme Court 

 what remained of the Voting Rights Act, leaving one of its central provisions — Section 2, known as the “sword” of the law because of its enforcement powers — “all but a dead letter.”

To illustrate the effects of the decision, Kagan 

 that we imagine a hypothetical circle-shaped, single-county district in a rectangle-shaped state. The circle’s population, thanks to historical patterns of racial segregation, is 90 percent Black. The surrounding rectangle is 90 percent white. Voting is racially polarized, with Black residents voting overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates and white ones voting for Republicans. Those who reside in the circle elect representatives that no one in the remaining rectangle would put in office. Under these conditions, the circle’s Black community is able to elect a representative of its choice year after year. Kagan then asks us to imagine that the state legislature decides to eliminate the political power of the circle. It splits the circle into six equal slices and distributes the Black voters to six new, solidly white congressional districts. With the state’s Black voters dispersed into predominantly white districts, they cannot elect a representative of their choice. “Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted,” Kagan wrote.

As the dissent points out, “That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form. A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and faces continued adversity from racial division, is split — ‘cracked’ is the usual term — so that it loses all its electoral influence.” Black people can still cast a vote, but will never be able to elect a candidate that represents their political beliefs in the same way that the white population can. As Kagan explains, “Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice.”

The votes of individual Black people are worth less than — and are therefore unequal to — the votes of whites. That is a violation of the 15th Amendment — exactly the sort of constitutional violation that the Voting Rights Act was meant to remedy.

Indeed, in drafting Section 2 of the law, Congress focused explicitly on whether electoral practices “would 

 in minority citizens having less opportunity than non-minority citizens to choose their political representatives,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. Under Jim Crow, Southern states had put in place seemingly race-neutral barriers to political participation — literacy tests, poll taxes, confusing registration processes that were selectively enforced — that had the effect of systematically disenfranchising Black voters. Section 2 was designed to correct that even in the absence of evidence of intentional, purposeful discrimination to subvert the Black vote. Results were what mattered.

 of the issues in Callais. In 2022, in response to the most recent census, the Louisiana legislature redrew the state’s congressional district map, allotting only one of the state’s six congressional districts as a majority Black district.

Because Black voters make up one-third, not one-sixth, of Louisiana’s population, voters and civil rights advocates sued, alleging that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A federal district court thought that the plaintiffs were likely to win if the case made its way through the court system, and an appeals court agreed; Louisiana was ordered to draw a new map, or at least consider doing so, before the case continued its legal journey in 2024. The state legislature’s new map created a second district in which Black voters were the majority.

This map was then challenged by a group of plaintiffs describing themselves as “non-African-American voters,” who claimed that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause had been violated because voters were allocated to districts based on race. A federal district court panel ruled that the second “majority-minority” district was illegally gerrymandered. The Supreme Court paused the effect of that decision until after the 2024 election and agreed to hear an appeal from voting rights advocates, who argued that a new map drawn on the basis of the lower court decision would “crack” the second majority-minority district, scattering Black voters to majority-white districts and diluting their political power. As Kagan argued in the Callais dissent, they would still be able to vote, but because they could not elect their candidate of choice, their votes would count for less, which is a constitutional violation.

The case for overturning the lower court ruling and keeping a second Black-majority district relied on Congress’s clearly stated intentions. In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was amended, Congress was explicit that the test of alleged violations was the 

 of election laws and processes, not the 

 of officials overseeing them. If the effect of a congressional district map was to diminish Black political power, that was a constitutional violation. The rationale for this was widely understood and accepted at the time, even by many Republicans:

Legislators and public officials don’t typically make openly racist pronouncements to justify changes to voting that diminish and eliminate Black political power. On the contrary, these changes usually come with race-neutral justifications. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to judge the racist 

In Callais, the Supreme Court majority turned a half century of legislative and legal precedent upside down. The six justices in the majority looked away from history and inserted their own judgment, exchanging the law as written and rewritten by Congress for the law as they wanted it. In the place of an effects test to determine violations of the law, they imposed an intent test. It no longer matters how a change to the state’s maps affects Black voters. Now the only actionable proof of a constitutional violation is to show that the change was motivated by an identifiable individual or individuals driven by racist animus. This will make it all but impossible to prove Voting Rights Act claims going forward.

To make matters worse, the court’s conservative majority has ruled over the past decade that gerrymandering for partisan advantage is perfectly acceptable. Voting rights plaintiffs alleging discrimination must now not only prove that a redistricting plan was motivated by open racism; they also must exclude the possibility that the plan grew out of acceptable nonracial motives, including partisan advantage.

Returning to Justice Kagan’s hypothetical circle-within-a-rectangle example, it simply isn’t possible to satisfy both the needs of Black voters for a consolidated majority-Black district and the political motivations for carving up the district. Preserving Republican power in states that the party controls — now a perfectly legitimate justification for extreme gerrymandering — requires diminishing Democratic political power in those states. If Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic, they will consistently be on the outs, and anyone raising a voting rights discrimination claim arising from those circumstances is destined to lose.

, the Supreme Court changed the rules of the game that prevailed for half a century to allow Republicans to lock in a white-majoritarian partisan advantage in states that they control while blunting the tools created to challenge it. As Kagan concluded, “The Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

. Within days, Republican-controlled legislatures in the South moved to eliminate Black-majority districts in their states.

 had begun the process of following Texas’s gerrymandering example with new maps that will snuff out much of the remaining Black political power in the state. In 

, Republicans carved up the state’s one reliably Democratic congressional district, which is centered in Memphis, one of America’s largest majority-Black cities. In 

, the Supreme Court okayed a plan to call off an election that was already in progress in order to eliminate the second majority-Black district.

 got the Supreme Court’s blessing to reinstate a map that a lower court had determined was racially discriminatory, eliminating one of two Black-majority districts; Rep. Shomari Figures, whose election in 2024 marked the first time that Alabama had sent two Black members to the House of Representatives, will likely lose his seat. In 

, the State Senate stopped short of approving a new map to eliminate the state’s only Democratic district and end Rep. James Clyburn’s 30-plus years in the House of Representatives, but Republicans will no doubt try again next year.

s shocking as it is, the Supreme Court’s decision is not surprising when considered in context. The court has long been gripped by what former Justice William Brennan 

 a “fear of too much justice,” one that flows from its perspective on race and racism.

 gutting a different provision of the Voting Rights Act, the conservative supermajority justified their decision by insisting that much has changed for the better in the South, including racism in voting practices.

 about injustice in the South, their larger perspective on racism makes matters worse.

The conservative majority subscribes to an 

 — the perverse idea that the way to deal with racial injustice is to ignore racism and treat everyone as though race does not matter.

Conservatives have twisted Martin Luther King Jr.’s 

 to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, into a weapon to be used against inheritors of King’s struggle for racial justice. Colorblindness transforms 

 into suspect, if not altogether illegal, behavior. This attitude is of a piece with the idea that the law — and the courts that interpret it — can address only openly expressed racist actions. The Supreme Court’s prevailing ideology privileges the perspective of the perpetrator of racial injustice, rather than its victim. As long as the perpetrator did not act with expressed intent, there is no avenue for recourse, regardless of the harm inflicted. Under the conservative majority’s framework, policies and practices that are race-neutral on their face but lead to harmful outcomes for Black people are beyond the reach of the law.

Supreme Court decisions from long before the current Roberts court reflect this tortured perspective.

 in 1987, the justices acknowledged that those convicted of capital crimes were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the decedent was white, but they ruled that this was not proof of racial discrimination. That required evidence of some individual in the system — a prosecutor, a judge, a juror — displaying intentional racism against the defendant. More recent Supreme Court rulings have continued in this vein

 to enhance the diversity of their student bodies. Instead, using race at all in admissions is now seen as the problem. If the conservative justices get their way, the same reasoning will apply to any issue in which there is a racial dimension: housing, environmental and climate justice, health care, employment, technology, and any other aspect of civic life.

Given all that, what’s next? People raising claims of racial discrimination in voting might try to offer evidence of intentional racism by pointing to the express statements or actions of lawmakers who are careless enough to say the quiet part out loud. Legislators can 

 to bar partisan gerrymandering, eliminating the pretext for discrimination in voting rights gifted to Southern states by the court’s conservative majority. But people rarely proclaim publicly that they are engaging in racist behavior; sometimes they do not even think what they are doing is racist. And the political advantages to be gained, especially for Republicans, make any effort to outlaw partisan gerrymandering a long shot.

The story does not end there, though. Part of what this moment demands are efforts to increase our collective consciousness and civic engagement. Those who care about progressive change and racial justice have to understand the full extent of the damage caused by Callais and why it matters. Beyond that, we have to challenge the court’s flawed conception of race by remaining race-conscious. In part, that requires recognizing and challenging the ways that race shapes the distribution of benefits, burdens, privileges, and hardships in American society, to the disadvantage of Black and brown people. It also requires being concerned with the impact that a policy or practice is having on people’s lives, regardless of the intentions of those behind the policy. Finally, we have to build lasting, durable political coalitions that center the interests of those at the margins and on the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Those are the types of coalitions that drive social movements, which ultimately serve as engines for change.

is a sober reminder of just how fragile the gains of the last half century are and that progress is always met with resistance and retrenchment. The road ahead will be long and difficult, but if we take stock of the lessons of Callais, we might be able to forge a different path forward that ultimately vindicates the promises made in the Constitution. That work — of forcing America to live up to its stated principles in its founding document — is the subject of an ongoing battle for racial justice and equality in this country. That battle is far from over.

Hammer&Hope

Vincent M. Southerland

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11

The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power

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