The Supreme Court Sapping Black Voting Power Was Not an Accident (Slate) [View all]

There is a particular kind of violence the U.S. Supreme Court majority prefers because it can deny it while it is happening. This has never been more obvious than in its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

Louisiana is soaked in what was done to Black people to make the state exist, and there is no honest way to talk about this case without starting there. Louisiana, like every other Southern state, built its wealth and political order through a system that treated human life as something to be violated and exploited and then insisted on calling that arrangement natural. The violence that enforced Black subjugation was not hidden in the way people now prefer to imagine. It was visible, repeated, justified, and graphic. And when enslavement ended, those lessons did not disappear so much as settle into new forms, into politics that could be controlled, participation that could be managed, rules that could be defended, and eventually into legislative maps that could accomplish stealthily what open terror once did in daylight.

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The majority’s opinion entombs one of the greatest democratic achievements in American history across dozens of pages, layered with citations, careful phrasing, and the posture of seriousness that courts rely on to signal authority. You read it and you can feel the effort, the accumulation of language, and the insistence that this was a difficult case. But it is hard not to step back from it and see something much simpler taking shape underneath all that ink. Because when you strip away the scaffolding, when you set aside the tone and the length and the performance of rigor, what remains is not complicated at all. It is a conclusion about who gets to matter in the political life of this country and under what conditions. It is a statement, dressed up in doctrine, that Black voters may participate but cannot insist that their participation carry power. It is striking, in that light, how much work the opinion must do to say something so straightforward.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/05/supreme-court-black-voting-tennessee-gerrymander-callais.html