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.
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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Not a Return, but a Revelation: Can the Republic Survive Its Truth?
I want to begin by thanking Professor Eddie Glaude for what can only be described as a loud, unflinching megaphone moment. In a time that rewards evasion, he has chosen clarity. He has spoken plainly, naming what many would prefer to obscure, and in doing so has once again forced the country to confront itself.
Glaude’s piece is powerful because it refuses euphemism. It names the pattern directly and situates the present moment inside a long historical arc rather than treating it as an aberration. In that sense, it stands within a necessary tradition, one that insists that what is at stake is not simply policy, nor even partisanship, but the deeper question of what kind of political body the United States has always been struggling to become.
That clarity matters. Without it, the moment collapses into procedure, into technical disagreement, into politics as usual. What is restored here is the moral register.
And yet, the force of that clarity opens space for a further step.
The language of a “white Republic” carries undeniable historical weight. It captures something real about the outcomes we continue to witness. But the mechanism through which those outcomes are produced may be less a matter of unified intention and more a function of structure. Power in the American context has often operated not as a single declared project, but as a system that reproduces itself through law, precedent, and institutional habit. The issue is not only what is willed, but what is built into the operation of the system itself.
This is where the question shifts.
The present moment can be read as a return, but it is more accurately understood as a disclosure. The suggestion of return implies that the underlying tension was once resolved. The historical record suggests something more fragile. Reconstruction was interrupted. The civil rights era, while transformative, did not dismantle the deeper legal and institutional patterns but reworked them. Gains were real, but they remained contingent.
From this perspective, what we are witnessing is not a system reverting, but one revealing the terms under which it has always functioned.
The Constitution sits at the centre of this tension. It speaks in the language of universality, but it does not enforce itself. It is a text whose meaning is carried through legal interpretation and political practice. Where there is insufficient moral conviction to sustain its promises, legality becomes the mechanism through which those promises are managed, narrowed, and, at times, circumvented.
The Reconstruction Amendments make this especially clear. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were not minor revisions. They were an attempt to re-found the republic, to align its practice with its stated ideals. Emancipation, equal protection, and voting rights were intended to transform the political community itself.
And yet, from their inception, these amendments were absorbed into a legal and political order that limited their reach.
Du Bois saw this with clarity. In Black Reconstruction, he described the post-war moment not simply as a victory, but as a revolution that was “overthrown.” The promise of emancipation was real, but its full meaning was never secured. What had been opened was, in critical respects, closed again.
That closure took institutional form. As historians such as Eric Foner have shown, the end of Reconstruction gave way to what was called “Redemption,” a systematic reassertion of white political control across the South. Through law, violence, and policy, the gains of the war were narrowed, contained, and, in many cases, reversed.
And the mechanism of that containment was often legal rather than overtly political. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court did not reject the Constitution’s promise of equality. It reinterpreted it. Segregation was rendered compatible with equal protection. The constitutional mandate remained, but its meaning was altered in practice.
These are not marginal episodes. They form a pattern.
Emancipation followed by coerced labour.
Equal protection followed by segregation.
Voting rights followed by systematic disenfranchisement.
The constitutional language persists. The lived reality is mediated.
It is here that a more unsettling question begins to take shape. If the war was won on the battlefield, but its social and political order was reconstituted through law, what, in that deeper sense, was the nature of that victory?
Who won the Civil War, if we measure not armies, but what endured?
This is not a question of denial, but of structure. Not a rejection of the war’s outcome, but an inquiry into the persistence of the order it sought to transform.
This pattern continues into the present. The role of the Court, often understood as corrective, sits within this longer trajectory. Moments such as the Warren era appear less as the norm and more as exceptions within a system where law has more often stabilised existing power than disrupted it. What appears as decline may, in fact, be a resumption.
At the same time, the frame remains largely internal. The argument calls the nation to account against its own ideals, and that tradition carries immense moral force. But there is also a broader context to consider. The United States emerged within a world structured by conquest, exclusion, and the management of populations. Within that frame, questions of voting and representation are not only about participation, but about the boundaries of belonging.
In that sense, the issue is not simply distortion, but administration. The management of presence without the full granting of power.
This brings us back to the question that sits at the heart of Glaude’s analysis: what happens to a country that must believe a lie because of a deep-seated fear that the truth will rip it apart?
The question already contains its own horizon. It points toward reckoning, whether moral, political, or institutional. But it may be that the reckoning is not something that arrives from outside. It is something that unfolds from within.
A political order cannot indefinitely sustain a gap between what it declares and what it practices without consequence. Over time, that gap does not simply remain hidden. It becomes visible, legible, even undeniable. What once required interpretation begins to appear self-evident.
In that sense, the cognitive dissonance is no longer abstract. It begins to take form in the very structure that was meant to resolve it. The Constitution, long treated as a stabilising document, starts to read differently. Its promises remain, but their contingent application becomes increasingly clear. The tension between universality and practice becomes harder to obscure.
What emerges is not simply crisis, but exposure.
And exposure carries risk. Not only the risk of political conflict, but the deeper risk that the story a nation tells about itself can no longer hold. If the truth does not merely challenge the system but reveals the terms upon which it has always operated, then the fear Glaude names becomes intelligible. It is not only fear of change. It is fear of unmaking.
The question, then, is not only whether the country can face the truth, but whether it can survive what that truth requires.
For if the dissonance has become self-evident, the reckoning is no longer a possibility. It is already underway.
Author’s note: My engagement with the United States is not abstract. Having lived and worked there, I write from a place of both admiration and disquiet. It remains not only a nation, but a central archive of modern power, whose contradictions continue to shape the world beyond it.
I'm so glad to read your essays here. We are pretty low income, so I will see if the library would order the book. I enjoy hearing you on panels on TV. Thanks, Sally