The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has gutted the Voting Rights Act, basing their decision on the argument that race should not be used as a factor to create congressional districts that offer a heightened chance of non-white candidates being elected. Now, with that ruling as justification, Republican-controlled legislatures in the South are using race as a factor to create altered districts that will decimate the ranks of Black members of Congress.
Apparently, that kind of racial gerrymandering is just fine with the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices. In their imagined world, the South’s long history of racial discrimination and suppression of the Black vote is no longer of any significance. In the real world, however, Black voting rights in several states of the old Confederacy are once again being undermined by the same white political establishment that has always resisted sharing power with the descendants of the enslaved.
Oh, sure, Black citizens of those states will still be able to vote, but the GOP legislators are rapidly and shamelessly drawing new district lines to make it extremely difficult for Black people to elect one of their own.
Southern Republicans will protest that they are not racists, that they are not at all like their ancestors who set impossible tests for Black voters or, worse, those who lynched Black men who dared to show up at the polls. And, yes, they may be more genteel. They may claim Black friends. They may never use the N word. But what they are doing with this blatant rush to redistrict Black representatives out of office is, at the very least, institutional racism.
The South is rising again, and it has not changed nearly as much as the justices of the high court claim.
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