Before me as I write this is a photo album open to the one surviving image of my great-grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, a rural Black South Carolinian born in the late 19th century. He died — decades after the 15th Amendment guaranteed Black people’s right to vote, and decades before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put the power of the federal government behind that guarantee — without, almost certainly, ever being allowed to vote.
Yet I’m not so alarmed that last week the Supreme Court took its latest gutting swipe at that 60-year-old law, which enfranchised millions of Black people, and helped lead to the election of hundreds of Black officials.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruled that even states like Louisiana, where about a third of the residents are Black, could create legislative districts that would most likely elect only white officials, as long as the denial of Black representation involved political considerations, not deliberate racial discrimination. But, the six conservative justices said, it was racially discriminatory to intentionally create majority-Black legislative districts designed to elect Black officials.
Viscerally, it can be hard not to see resistance to Black-majority electoral districts as anything but racist. But the overwhelming majority of Black voters are Democrats, which means that partisanship has a disproportionate effect on Black people. To many, this justifies focusing on effect, not intention, since the way party support tracks with race means that racism can always be disguised as partisanship. As Justice Elena Kagan bemoaned in her dissent, a plaintiff objecting to district maps that kept Black voters from electing representatives of their choice would need to show that the maps were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose,” something that is “well-nigh impossible.” She thought the court need concern itself only with the racial effects, not racial purpose, as it had from 1986 until last week’s ruling.
But we seem less concerned about effects when other groups of people have limited ability to elect their favorite candidates. We do not think of the white Republican in San Francisco as meaningfully disenfranchised.
The question is whether present-day conditions justify classifying Black people as a special case.
Past conditions did. Fifty years ago, we needed majority-minority districts where Black voters could vote in Black representatives, creating a new normal. And it worked. In 1982 there were a mere 19 Black people in Congress; now there are 67. There are more than 10,000 Black elected officials in America today, compared with only about 1,500 in 1970 and about 5,000 in 1982.
Also, Black voter turnout has trended up since the 1980s, although it has fallen since 2012. And, since those days, “the Black vote” has changed. While Black voters still support Democrats by huge margins, their support for Donald Trump has grown with each election. In 2024, 15 percent of Black voters cast ballots for him. That shows that the Black vote is not what it once was and may never be again.
It’s easier to claim that change doesn’t happen than to allow that it happens slowly, as it has with Black Americans.
Yet from the doomsaying about the Louisiana v. Callais decision, many seem to think that this decision will essentially set us back to square one. Justice Kagan worried that Callais has “laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction,” with the possibility that most majority-minority districts will be dissolved. But that scenario may be alarmist. While some Republican leaders in South Carolina are eager to redraw the state’s congressional map, its State Senate leader warned in January that dividing Black voters to end the state’s only district that is majority Black and Democratic could simply add another Democratic district.
And it can be hard to perceive the earth shifting. True — as Kagan notes, an analysis of Louisiana elections showed that only about 12 percent of white Louisiana voters supported candidates preferred by Black voters. But in 2018, eight majority-white districts in America elected Black people to Congress. And in 2023, the number of Black people in Congress representing plurality-white districts was 30.
Nor does a Black candidate have to keep mum about race issues to get elected. Predictably, being a Republican can help get a Black candidate elected to Congress in white districts, as with Burgess Owens of Utah and John James of Michigan; this is true even in the South, as Byron Donalds of Florida can attest. But we must shed any assumption that Black Republicans somehow “don’t count.” You can’t heartily agree that Black people are not a monolith yet classify Black Republicans as misguided irrelevances. And meanwhile, Lucy McBath of Georgia won in a majority-white district as a Democrat.
Some of the pessimism about the Supreme Court’s decision is rooted in a kind of habit. It can seem enlightened to treat Black people as underdogs. As Black people our watchcry can seem Faulknerian, in that the past is never really past. And to others, it can feel as if joining us in this gloomy characterization is the moral thing to do, that to have confidence that Black people can cope with change is somehow abusive.
W.E.B. DuBois in “The Souls of Black Folk” asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” If Black voters can be meaningfully represented only by Black candidates, and some shifty Republican operators with their maps can really all but undo 60 years of electoral transformation, then Black Americans remain a problem.
I don’t think we are. There has been enough “good trouble,” as the great John Lewis used to put it, that I highly suspect that, to put it in the modern argot, We Got This.
