In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s 2024 Congressional map—which sought to create a second majority-Black district in the state—was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Within hours of the ruling, legislatures and governors across the South began moving with urgency to redraw Congressional maps, dilute Black voting power, and further weaken what remained of the protections enshrined in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. What transpired was the most aggressive assault on Black political representation since Reconstruction.
Expediency was the point. After all, midterms are coming and heaven forbid those people vote.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act represented one of the few remaining structural barriers that prevented states with long histories of racial discrimination from openly diminishing Black political power through gerrymandering. The Court’s decision in Callais dramatically narrows Section 2 of the statute, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures.
Historically, Section 2 allowed parties to challenge districting maps that used gerrymandering to discriminate against minority groups. This component of the law is vital because modern discrimination rarely announces itself as overt segregation. Often, lawmakers dog-whistle their intention using phrases like “election integrity,” “partisan advantage,” “race neutrality,” and “traditional districting principles.” But by redistricting Congressional maps to artificially lower the Black population in each district, these laws dilute the power of Black voters. This is the case in Louisiana, where, despite the state’s 32.6 percent Black population, there is only one majority-Black district represented in the current Congressional map.
In practice, Callais effectively gives states broad latitude to claim that these discriminatory maps were merely partisan—making them legal under the Voting Rights Act, which does not explicitly prohibit partisan gerrymandering. While the Court did not explicitly allow states to diminish Black representation, it did something more powerful: It signaled permission for state governments to redistrict their Congressional maps, with the goal of diluting Black votes, so long as lawmakers can frame the effort—even minimally—as partisan rather than racial. In much of the South, Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates due to generations of civil rights struggles and policy alignment. The result is a legal framework where states can target Black political power while claiming they are merely pursuing partisan advantage.
Some states have since taken that message and run with it. Two weeks after the Callais ruling, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a special legislative session to redraw Congressional and legislative maps. Mississippi State Auditor Shad White has openly discussed redistricting efforts to eliminate or reduce the percentage of Black voters in the district represented by Congressmember Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Black member of Congress. And in Alabama, nearly six weeks after the Callais decision, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Republican lawmakers to pursue maps that would reduce Black-majority Congressional districts from two to one.
The aftermath of Callais has reinforced how coordinated the machinery of modern anti-Black disenfranchisement has become. The Court provides Constitutional cover; states operationalize the discrimination. This is nothing new. For instance, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson paved the way for discriminatory Jim Crow laws, state courts instituted restrictive voting laws such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to keep Black voters from the polls. Today, limitations continue to disproportionately affect communities of color, with voter ID laws and long lines at polling stations on Election Day.
The Voting Rights Act allowed race-specific remedies to address historically discriminatory mapmaking, often resulting in districts that were majority Black. Callais makes any map that seeks to explicitly address race impermissible. By framing race-conscious remedies themselves as Constitutionally suspect, the Court has elevated a vision of so-called colorblindness that ignores the enduring realities of racial exclusion in American politics.
The language changes, but the outcome remains remarkably familiar to the racially restrictive maps before the Voting Rights Act was passed.
The modern conservative legal movement has learned that it does not always need sweeping declarations or explicit reversals of equality. It only needs enough judicial nudging to destabilize protections and embolden state action.
Recent history has seen the pattern repeat itself again and again.
After the weakening of the Voting Rights Act in earlier cases like Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, states rapidly implemented voter identification laws, polling place closures, aggressive voter roll purges, and racialized redistricting schemes. The removal of federal preclearance unleashed years of restrictions disproportionately impacting Black voters across the South.
After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion bans took effect almost immediately across multiple states through trigger laws that had been prepared in advance.
After the landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which targeted affirmative action and race-conscious admissions policies, conservative activists and attorneys general quickly expanded attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education, corporations, and government.
After increasingly hostile rhetoric and rulings affecting transgender rights, state legislatures introduced hundreds of bills targeting health care access, school participation, identity documents, and public existence for LGBTQ+ Americans.
Years of piecemeal progress and policy concessions related to civil rights can now be torn down in weeks through coordinated legal and political action. Entire communities are forced into defensive postures while institutions like state election boards, advocacy organizations, and state governments struggle to keep pace with the sheer volume of restrictions and litigation.
And perhaps most dangerously, the instability itself becomes normalized. Marginalized communities are faced with the proposition that fundamental rights are temporary. Our citizenship, bodily autonomy, political representation, and equal protections are all contingent on the ideological makeup of courts and statehouses.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority often insists it is merely interpreting Constitutional principles rather than engaging in politics, repeatedly rejecting criticism that the Court operates as a political institution. At the same time, we are able to see a judiciary willing to move with remarkable urgency when limiting the rights of communities in need of protection.
When it comes to limiting the rights of Black people, it happens at light speed, and the asymmetry is not lost on the public. Generations of civil rights organizing, marching, litigating, educating, and dying to secure rights like voting protections can seemingly be undone in hours by the courts. The targets may shift—Black voters, immigrants, women, queer people—but the underlying project perpetuated by conservative lawmakers remains strikingly consistent. The goal is not to win policy disputes. It is to narrow the boundaries of belonging itself.
What we are witnessing is a coordinated fast-tracking of exclusion, a system designed to make civil rights protections fragile, conditional, and reversible whenever resentment wields institutional power.
What happened recently with Black voting power is a massive blow to efforts to protect rights for all communities, but it’s not the end. The desired feeling of despair in the Black community is meant to serve as a warning for all others: We can come for you too if you don’t get in line. We are increasingly expected to adapt to the curtailment of our rights as ordinary political fluctuation rather than the hate fueled emergencies they are.
As we move forward in our new reality, organizing matters, but so too does resilience. The hope of the oppressors is for us to retreat, but the massive mobilization in Montgomery, Alabama, days after Southern states removed Black Congressional districts tells a different story. In six days organizers were able to activate thousands and reach millions across the country. As fast as they can exclude us, so too can we fight back.