Yesterday, I focused on the fact that Americans can no longer rely upon the Supreme court for defense of basic human and constitutional rights. I had already written and scheduled that post when I read Kristoffer Ealy’s truly outstanding diatribe on the subject at Lincoln Square.
Ealy teaches American Government, political behavior and political psychology in southern California, and as the saying goes, he has a way with words. His essay is long, but I really encourage you to read it in its entirety–it’s worth it. He begins with context:
Before we get into what this Supreme Court is doing now, it is worth remembering what it has always been capable of. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to begin correcting the most catastrophic of those failures — and even then, states had to be dragged toward compliance like toddlers toward a bath. The Court has always had the capacity for moral failure at scale. What is different now is the combination of ambition and costume.
Ealy unmasks the judicial rhetoric, recounting what actually happened in Callais, because–as he says– “the legal theater is designed to make your eyes glaze over and that is entirely intentional.”
Louisiana is approximately 33% Black. For years, it had one majority-black district. After the 2020 census, a lawsuit forced the state to draw a second majority-Black district, to give Black voters “a meaningful shot at electing someone who actually represents them.” Voters describing themselves as “non-African American” sued, claiming the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the six-justice majority, agreed with them. His central argument was that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race” and that the question before the Court was whether “compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”
He concluded it couldn’t.
Ealy says Alito was “carefully arranging words into something that looks like principle from a distance and collapses into nonsense the moment you apply pressure.” He repackaged the protection of Black voters’ right to meaningful representation as racial discrimination. “Not misinterpreted. Repackaged.” (Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised by Alito’s dishonesty. It was front and center in Dobbs and Hobby Lobby.)
As Ealy points out, six justices signed on to a word salad designed to make dismantling of voting rights sound like the protection of them.
These are six people with law degrees from the most prestigious institutions in the country. Harvard. Yale. Notre Dame. Combined they have more legal training than most courtrooms have ever seen assembled in one room. And not one of them — not one — bothered to engage with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship on what race actually is and what racism actually does…
The audacity of Alito’s framing is not accidental. It is the entire con. He didn’t just reach a bad conclusion. He inverted the premise so completely that the remedy became the crime. That is not legal reasoning. That is a magic trick for people who find racism more comfortable when it comes with footnotes.
Ealy admits that he comes to his analysis as a political scientist, not a lawyer, and that he’s asking different questions: “does this decision move the country toward democracy or away from it? Does it expand the circle of political participation or contract it? Does it reflect the actual needs of the society it governs?” By those measures, he finds Callais a catastrophic failure, because–as decades of scholarship have demonstrated– “racism is not simply prejudice.” it is prejudice plus power— “the deployment of institutional authority in the service of racial hierarchy. Individual bigotry is prejudice. Racism is what happens when that bigotry gets a robe, a gavel, and the full weight of the federal government behind it.”
You really need to read the whole essay.
If there was any doubt that this administration and this Court are intent upon reviving Jim Crow, the haste with which Southern states are rushing to obliterate majority-black districts–and the Court’s decisions allowing them to do so, in stark contrast to prior precedents forbidding such changes so close to elections– should dispel it.
The South really is rising again–thanks in large part to this Court.
But so is a new civil rights movement.
As a current meme goes: the MAGAtes want to take us back to the fifties. No, not the nineteen-fifties…the eighteen-fifties.
Is this what Miriam Adelson spent 250 million dollars for?
I actually waffle on this topic. I firmly believe the law must be colorblind; the 14th Amendment was designed to ensure the government treats every citizen as an individual, not merely as a member of a racial group.
The same principle applies to DEI. When I studied it, it was taught as an organizational best practice and a leadership strategy—not a bureaucratic tool to force sociological compliance or “mandate demographic quotas.”
Just as the VRA was created to guarantee equal access to the ballot box rather than to mandate race-based outcomes, DEI was never intended to be weaponized by political organizations to further divide us along racial lines.
p.s. If you look at how the US voted in 2024, it still aligned with the typical stereotypes to fit each party’s narrative. The phrase we used when I ran for office was, “Voters get the government they deserve.” How true.
Sorry, but the African American contingent does NOT deserve this gov’t!
Here come de south! Here come de south! Damn!
So I looked at the “new civil rights movement” piece, and right in its middle was/is an ad for Fox News, just the thing no one deserves.
The six robed bozos do not deserve the title of “Justice,” but then, as is obvious, this is not a just world.
Some of them blatantly lied, under oath, during their confirmation hearings, which were nothing but performative. And, once again, where was Mitch Mcconnell, right in the middle of it all. I’ll stop, now.
Not only is it a fact that Americans can no longer rely upon the Supreme Court for the defence of basic human and constitutional rights protection, it is also true that we cannot rely upon ANY part of the current administration for such protection. And I will add that this applies to every red state government too. If the upcoming midterm elections bring about a return of such a protection, it will prove that “government of, by, and for the people” endures on this earth. A defeat come November will mark the end not only of such a government, but also mark the end of those very ideas about who should run our lives.
I have a background in mathematics, including probability and statistics. As such, the idea of forcing states to have a certain number of districts with a majority of a minority voting block makes me very nervous. That said, I am completely in favour of independently-drawn districts (as we have in Canada).
My worry stems from imaginings that the (say one-third) black population of a state was spread fairly uniformly across it. Then, independently-drawn districts might not include _any_ that had a majority black population. And, you’d have to really force the lines to make it happen. Equally, you’d be forcing other districts to have more non-black population than they’d otherwise have, which would decrease the voting power of the black populace in those other districts. It just feels to me that any time you force this sort of thing, you can create more problems than are solved.
In truth, of course, the black population is unlikely to be spread evenly, and so independently-drawn maps are still likely to capture larger groups of them within certain districts, in a quite natural way. But, it may be more or (more likely ) less than adhering to a simple calculation whereby the proportion of black-majority districts is similar to the proportion of the black populace in the state.
In my view, just drawing districts in an independent manner, such that the district you are in makes sense geographically, is the best solution. This means a voter always has a relationship to their district. They know that all the people around them are from the same district. This will foster the sense that the voting situation is fair. Arbitrarily trying to force a different situation would undermine that sense of fairness.
All this said, this is _not_ why Roberts and the rest of the conservative court chose their path, of course. It was just racism.
For a large portion of my working life, I was in “management”. I developed an appreciation for diversity in the workplace. When you have to motivate people, you need an appreciation of the things that matter to those you supervise. In addition to white men and women, I’ve had supervisory responsibility for black men and women, Latinos and Latinas, and Asian/Pacific Islands men and women. I learned more from my employees than I can possibly measure. Every one of them taught me about people, but I learned more from from those from different ethnicity.
I also had a mentor who was a black woman. She taught me to deal with extremely angry people calmly and with dignity. That has served me well at No Kings rallies. When MAGATS yell obscenities at me, I smile, wave, and yell ” Thank you,” back to them. It’s a waste of time and effort to argue at a truck with a ruby red driver. Leave them scratching their heads.
Although we have come a long way since 1965, we still have decades, perhaps centuries to go. Shelby vs Holder set progress on racial issues back significantly. We don’t know how much the Callais decision, as wrong headed as it is, will impact the future. I’m praying for a backlash.
VOTE!!!
Apropos:
“Winter in America”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2zKdIcOV5s&list=RDieQWjSXdv-Y&index=4
The majority of the supreme court’s disregard for the years of effort on every level to amend the embedded racism from the imperfect start of US is cruel. Throwing out previous established decisions and citing racism against a majority race shows the egregious disregard for the wrongs of the past and present. The twisting of legalese to keep their own as benefactors of the gravy train is showing. Samuel Alito has been brainwashed by the extreme Catholic Doctrine Opus Dei (it’s been reported) which renders a person unable to think for themselves. Opus Dei has even been sanctioned by the Pope. It’s difficult to understand why when someone has the power to justly alleviate the suffering of others and they don’t.
Correction: Opus Dei was not sanctioned by the current Pope. It was reported that he criticized their non-Christian ways.