The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has gutted the Voting Rights Act, basing their determination on the argument that race shouldn’t be used as an element to create congressional districts that provide a heightened likelihood 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 sort of racial gerrymandering is simply positive with the Supreme Courtroom’s Republican-appointed justices. Of their imagined world, the South’s lengthy historical past of racial discrimination and suppression of the Black vote is not of any significance. In the true world, nevertheless, Black voting rights in a number of states of the previous Confederacy are as soon as once more being undermined by the identical white political institution that has at all times resisted sharing energy with the descendants of the enslaved.
Oh, positive, Black residents of these states will nonetheless be capable of vote, however the GOP legislators are quickly and shamelessly drawing new district strains to make it extraordinarily troublesome for Black individuals to elect considered one of their very own.
Southern Republicans will protest that they don’t seem to be racists, that they don’t seem to be in any respect like their ancestors who set not possible checks for Black voters or, worse, those that lynched Black males who dared to indicate up on the polls. And, sure, they could be extra genteel. They might declare Black pals. They might by no means use the N phrase. However what they’re doing with this blatant rush to redistrict Black representatives out of workplace is, on the very least, institutional racism.
The South is rising once more, and it has not modified almost as a lot because the justices of the excessive court docket declare.
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