Part of the Series Voting Wrongs
Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.
The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais undermines another key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed more than 60 years ago with the intent of protecting Black Americans’ voting rights and political representation.
With SCOTUS ruling majority-minority districts as a form of discrimination against non-Black people, Republican-led states are poised to dilute Black political power in a manner echoing the Jim Crow era when white southerners retook power from elected Black lawmakers and neutralized Black Americans’ voting rights for multiple generations. During Reconstruction, hundreds of African Americans won elected office as thousands of newly emancipated citizens engaged in the electoral process. The number of Black officeholders declined following Reconstruction’s end in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan launched terror campaigns against Black communities in efforts to blunt Black political power. Many whites also justified their attempts at undermining Black power by claiming African Americans were corrupt and thus not fit to participate in self-governance.
White theft of African Americans’ civil rights and economic power accompanied the destruction of Black political influence following the end of Reconstruction. White southerners moved to pass laws instituting segregation in education, public accommodations, and in the private sector. Jim Crow laws also entailed enforcing policies preventing Black Americans from voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.
One difference between the racial dictatorship of Jim Crow and the burgeoning racial regime is the contemporary manifestation of oppression is grounded in what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “colorblind racism,” or non-racialized actions and policies that reinforce Black and Brown marginalization. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative majority, justified invalidating Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder by pointing to the “great strides” in Black participation in electoral politics. Justice Samuel Alito echoed Roberts in his opinion for Louisiana v. Callais: “First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.”
However, eliminating minority-majority districts threatens to leave millions of Black Americans without representation that reflects their interests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on a new congressional map which could award up to four more GOP seats. Tennessee Republicans have drafted a new map that would eliminate the only predominantly-Democrat, and predominantly-Black, district. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s call for state Republicans to revisit Alabama’s map is striking because she is framing her actions as an attempt to remain in compliance with the law. Again, this ruling allows Republicans in states to disenfranchise Black voters under the guise of following “colorblind” law.
SCOTUS’s decision is the latest in a series of rollbacks in civil rights not seen since the post-Reconstruction era. Since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has sought to eliminate any policy associated with addressing historical instances of racism. The administration’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies has led to historic job losses for Black women. According to economist Katica Roy, more than 319,000 Black women lost their jobs in three months in 2025.
Many red states, especially in the South, continue to wage a war against Black history, especially the aspects of it that challenge myths of colorblindness and white innocence and victimhood. After complaining about how anti-racist activists have tried to “erase” history by tearing down Confederate monuments during his first presidency, Trump’s federal government continues its efforts to whitewash history, from its unsuccessful attempt to remove mentions of George Washington enslaving Black people at Independence Hall in Pennsylvania to reinstating names of military bases named after Confederate generals. This follows the ongoing assault that Republicans and higher education administrators in Florida, Texas, and Alabama have waged against DEI programs in education and the teaching of African American Studies, race, and gender studies. These attacks on anti-racism descend from the “Lost Cause” myth that emerged amid Reconstruction, which erased slavery as a cause of the Civil War and instead emphasized how the Confederate South fought valiantly to defend “state’s rights.”
Diluting the Voting Rights Act, attacking Black history and employment, challenging birthright citizenship legalized in the 14th Amendment — another pillar of Reconstruction policy — and eliminating immigration from “less desirable” countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are all part of this administration’s strategy to maintain the United States as a white nationalist country. The “Great Replacement” theory animates these attacks as many Americans believe that people of color threaten to overrun the U.S. and replace and oppress white Americans.
Like white reactionaries in the South attacking Black Americans’ freedoms and white northerners’ defense of segregation after the Civil War, this administration’s efforts to curb Black political and economic power and immigration are a backlash to the global racial justice uprisings in response to Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s murders by police in 2020. The 2020 protests represented everything that many white nationalists feared — a multiracial, multinational, and working-class movement against police violence, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. It seemed that a new political majority seeking a long overdue reckoning with the histories of racism and settler colonialism was on the cusp of formation amid the rebellion.
The backlash to the anti-racist conflagration emerged soon after the summer of 2020. Believing that anti-racist education projects like the 1619 Project lay at the foundation of the rebellion, Trump tried to undermine it with the “1776 Project,” which asserted a whitewashed and American exceptionalist interpretation of U.S. history. Attacks on critical race theory and DEI efforts followed and continued after Trump left office, as right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo waged a culture war against anti-racism. Democrats like then-Rep. and now-Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and President Joe Biden criticized calls to defund the police. Biden called for funding law enforcement, further undermining one of the main demands of 2020 demonstrators.
Resistance to this racist regime may start in a manner similar to Black Americans resisting Jim Crow and structural racism in the North during the 20th century civil rights movement and the organizing that laid the foundation for the 2020 protests — local people resisting “colorblind” racism and organizing protests and movements against the structures of white supremacy. Minnesotans have demonstrated the power of collective solidarity and community defense while resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection’s attempts to round up immigrants. And, as Jonathan Stegall and Anne Kosseff-Jones wrote in January for Truthout, Minneapolis’s anti-ICE resistance would not have transpired without the city’s 2020 racial justice uprising.
Collective political education is once again relevant as state legislatures and the federal government have sought to ban Black history, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other disciplines critical of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Political education programs such as Study and Struggle and efforts such as the hundreds of Black churches creating history programs to educate their communities are great examples of critical education capable of countering right-wing propaganda about race and racism, gender, war, immigration, and capitalism. Studying how power operates, organizing tactics and strategies, and histories of resistance also prepares us for confronting and defeating authoritarianism.
The only path to stopping this regime from completely disenfranchising everyone but its most privileged adherents is to make good on the longstanding calls by Black activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Workers Congress to transform U.S. society. We also learned from the range of abolitionist organizations and formations in the Twin Cities fighting against state violence like Black Visions, Reclaim the Block, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, and the recent collective opposition to ICE that we cannot reform ourselves out of structural racism. The structure of white power that can rear its monstrous head in response to racial justice movements must be destroyed and a new, more just and equal system must be built in its place.
Media that fights fascism Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump. We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.