Name The Devil

The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chief Justice Roberts has finally achieved what he has dedicated his career to doing, and the country is now poised to return to what it was: a herrenvolk democracy (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one).

If there was any doubt about the motivation behind the decision, the spiraling efforts of southern states to redraw districts in the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision betray the lie that this country is no longer exercised by racism in elections. Justice Alito cherry-picked data and contorted himself to assure “Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/finishing-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-declares-racism-over-again

States like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now hell-bent on redrawing congressional maps with the aim of increasing Republican representation in Congress and diluting the power of Black and brown voters. That is the rub: partisan gerrymandering is just the latest racial dog whistle.

And it is important for the Democratic Party to say as much.

This moment is more than a political will-to-power characterized by “the gerrymandering wars” with its race to the bottom. The court’s decision is part of a sweeping effort to undermine the country created in the aftermath of the sixties’ revolution – an explicit denial that our diversity constitutes a value worth defending and a rejection that ours is a multiracial democracy.

They want a white Republic.

According to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund, the court’s decision could result in as much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus losing their seats; close to 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the south could just disappear.

What we are facing here is the diminution of power, of an ability to impact policy and the direction of the country, of an effort to empty our votes of meaning. In many ways, it is reminiscent of the attacks on the civil war amendments and the world many sought to create in the wake of slavery’s end.

I am reminded of this moment in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, as he grapples with the implication of extending the right to vote to Black men. He wrote:

Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus, Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.

This was 1903! And we are still fighting that feud in 2026.

Democrats, I believe, must make explicit the racist motivation of this assault on Black voting rights and representation. Not by way of a nostalgic longing for the 1965 legislation or an appeal to the legacy of the civil rights movement. Or, to reduce this decision simply to Trump’s ongoing effort to remain in power or to undermine democratic norms.

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Tap dancing around the motivation of all this will let the racists off the hook and ensure that large segments of the country remain trapped in the belief that democracy is for rich, white people only. A historical repetition that made, in part, the Lost Cause possible.

We must name the devil that has us by the throat.

Some of us want to believe that the Earl Warren court (1953-1969) represents the historic role of the court when it comes to race matters. But that is an illusion. The court has played its role historically in ensuring that this place remains a white Republic. Louisiana v. Callais will take its place among a host of decisions that aimed to make it so as we cycled from sentimentality to rage.

We can’t rely on fantasies. Let’s ignore the political consultants and tell the truth about how we’ve arrived here and what these people are doing. It is the only way we can begin to break the fever once and for all.

In my new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, I ask this question. What happens to a country that must believe a lie because of a deep-seated fear that the truth will rip it apart? Trapped in madness for 250 years. Frederick Douglass knew this in 1852. We know it today. Americans cling to their storybook version of this place in order to avoid confronting madness. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, his last book:

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she practiced the antithesis of democracy…. No one surveying the moral landscape of our nation can overlook the hideous wreckage of commitment twisted and turned into a thousand shapes under the stress of prejudice and irrationality.

With this decision, Justice Alito and the other five justices made their contribution to “the hideous wreckage” and we live in the ruins. How shall we stand our trial now that the ugliness of America’s racism has emerged from the shadows?

If you would like to preorder a signed copy of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, and this is especially for the members of the A Native Son community, please click this link https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/america-u-s-a/ at Labyrinth books. I have signed copies just for you!

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