| > Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans … drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts. That’s the expected outcome in the absence of racial discrimination. If a group is 1/3 of the state population, and you divide it into districts, you’d expect the population to be 1/3 in each of those districts as well. If there is not an even population distribution you might expect one district to be majority minority. But two would require extreme gerrymandering unless the population distribution was highly uneven. > In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions. Yes, absolutely. This is a core principle, and a necessary principle in a multi-racial democracy. Especially one like ours, which has no majority race any longer. > This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress. Creating race-based voting districts is the opposite of social progress. The idea of organizing politics along racial lines—and drawing that into our voting maps—is retrograde and racist. > It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately. It wasn’t, then we fought a big war, and we got the 14th amendment, which was designed to be color blind. It was designed to protect the interest of minorities in being treated identically without regard to race. So were the civil rights Laws. You should watch the movie “RBG.” Justice Ginsberg built her career as a lawyer advocating to interpret the laws regarding sex discrimination in exactly the same way Justice Alito interprets the laws regarding race discrimination. She represented men challenging laws that purportedly discriminated in favor of women. Her argument was the laws say “equal,” and they mean what they say. They don’t permit discrimination in either direction. > As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished It doesn’t matter whether racism has “vanished.” Two wrongs don’t make a right. The government can’t discriminate based on race in one place to cancel out asserted race discrimination in another place. If you want to combat racism, you have to do it directly. The appeals to history also ring hollow. It’s not 1965. Today, whites in Louisiana will overwhelmingly vote for a non-white who shares their politics over a white who doesn’t. In 2007, a brown guy became the first non-incumbent in a Louisiana history to win the governor’s race in the first round without a runoff. |