Black voting rights

Jamell Bouie, NY Times -   In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal level. And as long as there isn’t clear evidence of intentional discrimination — a standard that would have been difficult to prove at the height of Jim Crow, which rested on the same fiction of facial neutrality — it passes constitutional muster. In fact, lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are already planning special legislative sessions to apply the court’s ruling and erase the majority-minority districts in their states.

At a minimum, the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were written, passed and ratified to end the subordination of Black Americans and ensure their representation in the political community. It is perverse that this Supreme Court has used both amendments to facilitate what might become the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state level since the end of Reconstruction and the “redemption” of the South. Words meant to secure the political equality of all Americans are being raised as weapons to deprive them of just that.

Here, we see the problem with conservative “colorblindness.” A constitution that doesn’t see color — a constitution that treats all classifications as one and the same in a country defined by its sordid history of racial subordination — is a constitution that cannot see group inequality. And worse, it is a constitution that reifies this inequality through its willful blindness to the plain realities of our society. Liberty for those who profit from the cruel legacies of our past, endless struggle for those crushed under their weight.

Speaking in 1883, after the Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Frederick Douglass cried out for a court that would be as “true to the claims of humanity” as it “formerly was to the demands of slavery”: “I say again, fellow citizens, O for a Supreme Court which shall be as true, as vigilant, as active and exacting in maintaining laws enacted for the protection of human rights, as in other days was that court for the destruction of human rights!”