Upon hearing that the U.S. Supreme Court’s six conservative justices had callously dismantled to the last vestiges the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), I, like millions of other Americans, were simultaneously outraged and psychologically spent. A 6–3 U.S. Supreme Court decision eradicated a vital segment of the 1965 VRA, leaving Black voters nothing short of politically adrift. Its 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had resulted in a new Black-voter majority district. The majority opinion by right wing justice Samuel Alito argued (unconvincingly) that they were saving the 1965 VRA by nullifying it and that political maps like the ones that currently have 23 Black House members from former Confederate states are supposedly racist - because they discriminate against White people.

Section 2 of the VRA, which outlawed voting practices that culminated in minority voters having less opportunity than others to participate in the political process and select their preferred politicians, has effectively been revoked by the court. The decision grants permission for Republican states, seeking to eliminate districts where voters of color form the majority, the opportunity to do so. These are districts that tend to lean politically Democratic, and they are traditionally the center of Black political power. Immediately following the court ruling, various Southern politicians hailed the decision and declared that their states should move forward to increase Republican representation. This decision has provoked widespread condemnation. Slate’s Richard L. Hasen ranked it as maybe the worst Supreme Court ruling of the last century; that in pandering to aggrieved White Republicans, the conservative majority had created “a disaster for American democracy.” The normally politically diplomatic New York Times editorial board dramatically blasted the decision, referring to it as “a mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach” in which “the court has acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges.”

It is not an overstatement to argue that the outcome of such draconian legislation will probably result in the greatest deficit of voting power from Black Americans since the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow. Such a decision is the integration of Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson. It will be difficult to pinpoint how many seats Democrats will be deprived of in the Republican redistricting smorgasbord that the court’s decision has granted. The New York Times reported that the ruling would jeopardize about a dozen Democratic-leaning seats throughout the South. A report by Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group, recently declared that Republicans could pick up as many as two dozen seats. A few of these will be quickly captured in the November 2026 primaries, with Republican-controlled states rabidly implementing regressive methods to eradicate majority-minority districts that had been previously mandated by what remained of the VRA. Others will incrementally move toward Republicans over time as statehouses reorganize their districts ahead of next year’s special elections and the 2028 cycle.

Many on the political right are lauding this decision as a victory for a “colorblind” constitution. However, the truth is that ignoring and denying racial discrimination does not nullify it. Racism is a disease that requires a diagnosis. Without Section 2 or the political tools to respond to patterns of discrimination, it will be a largely futile effort to prohibit future legislative districts from resembling the racial demographics they did during the Jim Crow era. For the past sixty-one years, the VRA has provided civil rights advocates and the federal government vital ingredients necessary to outlaw racial discrimination in voting. The current supreme court treats the law’s very success as the reason why it is no longer necessary. This is a shortsighted and arguably disingenuous position to take.

Justice Alito’s opinion (who wrote for the majority) repeals the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, which specifically demanded that voting district maps should be drawn in a way that preserved the competitive representation of racial minorities - and that mere discriminatory impact was reason enough to render maps illegal, with no evidence of discriminatory intent required. Discarding congressional intent entirely, Alito claims that this provision was unconstitutional due to the fact that to ensure duplicative representation for Black voters, redistricting bodies have to consider race. This, the court contended, constitutes discrimination against non-Black voters. Such an argument reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Justice Alito, the other justices, and many other Americans are well astute to the reality that racism remains a potently vile and adversarial factor in the lives of many people of color. To pretend otherwise is engaging in willful ignorance and denial.

We are moving backwards at an alarming rate. It took the VRA to make the dreams of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution real. That horrific chapter also belongs to the supreme court of the 1870s. In a series of cases, the court greenlit decades of Klan and White League terror acts across the South and Southwest. The court’s steady erosion of the Reconstruction amendments - together with its evisceration of congressional efforts such as the Enforcement and Civil Rights Acts - smothered the civil rights movement in the former slave South. The high court also permitted state constitutions to effectively wipe out Black voting rights, launched decades of Jim Crow suppression of the vote, and nullified any hope of civic or socioeconomic equality. The upshot of all this regressive and cruel lawmaking from the bench was to erect a regime of injustice and inhumanity nearly as repugnant as slavery itself.

The majority of this right-wing court sinisterly aligns with them in infamy. Both courts, in the last third of the nineteenth century and the recent, previous decade have been all too willing to refuse to acknowledge that institutional, systemic, and systematic racism are perennial factors that have and continue to exist, and they have rather perversely opted to terminate updated federal safeguards of the vote under the guise of a supposedly color-blind society that has never existed. Justices on both courts viewed protecting the right to vote as a racial entitlement that gave undue preference to Black citizens.

The truth is that the conservative right has shrewdly and strategically (albeit in a perverse and sinister manner) played the long game. Republicans took cognizance of the success that the left had garnered during the 1960s, such as its monumental victories with the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the VRA (1965), culminating with the ratification of Roe in the early 1970s. Conservative activists then realized that they could employ similar strategies in their efforts to abolish such progress.

This decision will dramatically reduce racial diversity in Congress, most state legislatures (Southern state legislatures), and local jurisdictions such as city councils, by obliterating the protections of Section 2 of the act which had allowed a pathway to guarantee non-White voters would be provided some basic and equitable representation. Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito have demonstrated tenacious opposition to the belief of the United States as a diverse and pluralistic democratic society, and they have also showcased a blatant desire to arrogantly discard Congress’s perspective that judicious participation for minority voters occasionally requires that race-conscious remedies be implemented. Such a demonstrably unjust verdict provides many right-wing jurisdictions with the tragic ability to further politically engineer racially partisan gerrymandering. Additionally, it provides considerable ammunition for conservative, right wing (primarily White) Republican voters. We are currently in politically dark days in America.