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The nation is back to accomodating the white majority, enabling the disadvantaging of all other race groups
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, has significantly narrowed the scope of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a key provision for challenging racially discriminatory redistricting CBS News.
The ruling struck down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district to comply with Section 2 after a lower court found the state’s prior map diluted Black voting power. The Court held that race-conscious remedies, such as creating a majority-minority district to correct vote dilution, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution abcnews.com
The ruling struck down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district to comply with Section 2 after a lower court found the state’s prior map diluted Black voting power. The Court held that race-conscious remedies, such as creating a majority-minority district to correct vote dilution, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution abcnews.com
Wendell Phillips, an 1800's abolitionist, observed that, “Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.”
With the backdrop of tyranny expressed in this decision by Justice Roberts - the conservative justice effectively establishing a "colorblind" principle prohibiting any solutions that include any legislative advantaging of black Americans even when addressing proven racial discrimination in voting - we're, once again, left with a system of government and elections which only accommodates white Americans.
Is there anything more imperialist than less than a dozen people, who aren't our elected representatives, deciding for themselves that remedies to racial discrimination are no longer needed?
Peversely, in this regression away from ALL of the three planks of the Voting Rights Act, the mere attribute of 'white' skin affords the possessor the ability to act to dilute or negate ANY significant influence or opposition with their own lawsuits to now-racist friendly higher courts.
They will deny voting rights by not only by redrawing districts (as Florida has already announced it intends in the wake of the ruling), but by keeping a knee on the throat of majority black communities by wielding this new power to suppress and ignore lawsuits seeking the redress and representation that decades and decades of political regimes have recognized as the right of people historically denied those opportunities before the laws were passed in the 50's and 60's.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause (1868) was meant to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved Africans in America, and was expanded to protect a wide range of minority groups from discrimination in landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954); laws passed which helped dismantle centuries of systemic inequality, like the Voting rights amendments, such as the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which was meant to remove legal barriers which excluded minorities from political participation.
The VRA has taken us all of the way back to the original 14th and 15th amendments which were cynically represented for decades and decades as a guarantee of 'equality' for blacks in America. But, in fact, it would take the federal government to assert itself to make those rights a reality for black Americans, notably in Brown v. Board, but in myriad other court actions that put employers on guard against any intention to deny opportunity to minorities and provide remedies for citizens trying to gain a foothold in the workplace or other functions of society.
As, Kropotkin observed, "The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror."
"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle," Jefferson said in his inaugural, "that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
In short, the court has left white Americans, once again, in complete control of not only the access of minorities to government and the workplace; but control over redress of complaints from non-whites to the degree that there is no viable avenue to redress.
I mean, there's still a VRA on the books, but the Supreme Court struck down it's preclearance provisions first, assuring us that the other two legs were still in place; then they struck down the law allowing minorities to sue in court when they believed their rights were being abridged; now they've taken the last substantive plank away, leaving the 14th and 15 amendments abandoned, and promises and protections of rights for Americans with the attributes of dark skin like my own just unenforced words on paper somewhere.
This is unacceptable to me. White are allowed to dilute sizable black communities' voting power by redrawing districts; but those black communities are prevented from redawing districts to dilute the white majority's voting interests, or denied the ability to maintain their own influence on that white majority.
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Thank you, I wish I could disagree.
Thank you, I wish I could disagree.
