I slept in late on the morning of June 26, 2015. Kenny, a politically conservative friend I’d made while studying political science at the University of Southern Mississippi, woke me up with a phone call.
“Congratulations!” I heard his voice booming.
“What?” I said, sitting straight up in bed.
“Turn on your TV!”
I shouted an expletive or two. I knew what had happened.
The same scenario had played out with another phone call from him on the same morning exactly two years earlier in 2013, when I’d turned the television to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, meaning the federal government would have to start recognizing same-sex marriages in states where they were legal. The second time he called on a morning like that, it was to tell me the court had struck down all state marriage bans nationwide, paving the way for same-sex couples to equally enjoy the right to marry anywhere in the country.
That evening, I celebrated with other LGBTQ+ Mississippians at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson; the pride event had been planned well in advance of the momentous ruling. But even amid the elation, I knew it was a narrow victory; one justice, the Republican-appointed Anthony Kennedy, had been the swing vote in the landmark 5-4 Obergefell ruling.
The 2016 election was in full swing. Donald Trump had just descended the elevator to announce his first presidential campaign 10 days earlier. When The New York Times asked me to write an opinion piece on what I considered the most important issue of the upcoming presidential election that summer, it was a no-brainer.
“As a Southerner whose region’s history is rife with tales of discrimination, I know that there is no more important issue for 2016 presidential candidates than the question of who they will nominate to sit on the United States Supreme Court,” I wrote for the Times on Aug. 17, 2015. “The next president of the United States may very well have the chance to fundamentally remake the nation’s highest court for decades beyond his or her time in office.”
And so Trump did, and the 20th century began to unravel. On June 24, 2022, I ran up the street with my camera to Mississippi’s last abortion clinic to cover the moment that emotions exploded as news broke that the court had overturned Roe v. Wade, shutting down the Jackson Women’s Health Organization for good.
The fall of Roe was possible because, by the end of his first four years in office, Trump had replaced a third of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Kennedy, with appointees backed by the conservative Federalist Society—an organization that arose in the 1980s to contest the judicial and legal order that had produced major advancements for women and people of color in the mid-to-late 20th century.
In the years since Trump’s first term, the court has steadily unraveled much of the civil and human rights progress we made in the 20th century. It has rolled back environmental regulations, further diluting the line between church and state, curtailing the rights of young transgender people and ending affirmative action.
Now, the court has, unsurprisingly, virtually nullified one of the last remaining prongs of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made something like democracy possible in states like Mississippi—long a land of racial apartheid—for the first time in our history.
Not only were Black voters able to vote after the Voting Rights Act passed, but an update in the 1980s ended the practice of drawing all-white majority districts. In 1986, Mississippi elected the first Black lawmaker to the U.S. Congress since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1800s—in a state where nearly four-in-10 residents are Black.
That seat, which Democratic incumbent U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson now holds, is one of many Black-majority districts that white southern politicians are hoping to draw out of existence after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais on April 29. The ruling opened the door to eliminating Black-majority districts all across the South, and white Southern politicians have happily rushed through, eliminating majority-Black districts in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.
For decades, under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states with legacies of racism, like Mississippi, have had to ensure their Black populations were not denied opportunities for representation by maps that otherwise could have been racially gerrymandered to maximize the political power of only white voters. But much as with the affirmative-action ruling, this U.S. Supreme Court’s majority has determined that the remedy to racial discrimination is itself a form of racial discrimination.
The ideology that undergirds much of this is “colorblindness.” In her book “What Does It Mean to Be White?,” antiracist author Robin DeAngelo wrote that “Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.” In the introduction to her book “The New Jim Crow,” attorney Michelle Alexander wrote that “in the era of colorblindness … we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”
The Callais ruling relies on this feigned colorblindness to racist systems. So long as white politicians claim their redistricting practices are strictly about maximizing partisan advantages (meaning politicians are choosing their voters, instead of the other way around) and avoid donning white hoods or yelling racial slurs in the process, this U.S. Supreme Court’s majority appears happy to give its stamp of approval to clear efforts to lay waste to Black political power.
Because if it’s simply about partisanship, it’s “colorblind,” right? But that sort of thinking is egregiously naive, if not maliciously disingenuous. We did not wind up in a situation in Mississippi where something like 90% to 95% of Black voters vote for Democrats and 80% to 85% of white voters vote for Republicans by accident. In Mississippi and throughout the Deep South, it’s impossible to disentangle race from partisanship because of the longtime tradition of using race and racist dog whistles to divide and conquer for political advantage (a tactic increasingly used across the nation, not just in the South).
That history includes white Democrats and especially the Dixiecrats, the segregationist, white supremacists who ruled Mississippi for most of the 20th century as a one-party state. After a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the parties began to switch sides in the South. Republican operatives started adopting a “Southern Strategy” aimed at peeling away white Southern Democrats who were angry at national Democrats for advancing civil rights.
In a recording in 1981 that wasn’t revealed until years after his death, Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained the Southern Strategy that he had helped develop and lead like this:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Atwater, who worked for the Ronald Reagan campaign alongside future Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and would eventually serve as RNC chairman, poisoned American discourse in ways that continue to define our current political landscape. But he made clear with his explanation of the Southern Strategy that even so-called “colorblind” policies are often anything but colorblind.
Yet under this U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, even Jim Crow laws are deemed “colorblind.” In 2023, the Roberts Court allowed to stand Mississippi’s 1890 felony disenfranchisement law, partly because it is “facially neutral,” meaning it doesn’t explicitly say it exists to disenfranchise Black voters. But the men who wrote it into Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution explicitly said their goal was to disenfranchise Black voters by specifically stripping voting rights from people convicted of certain crimes that those white lawmakers believed Black people were more likely to commit.
That law’s defenders argued that the state somehow remedied the racism of the law in the 1950s and 1960s (a well-known era of racial comity and progress in Mississippi) by adding rape and murder to the list of disenfranchising crimes. Still, the law continues to do exactly what its white-supremacist authors designed it to do at Mississippi’s 1890 Constitutional Convention: It disenfranchises Black Mississippians at a much higher rate than white Mississippians.
“The President of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention said it plain: ‘Let us tell the truth if it bursts to the bottom of the Universe … We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,’” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent against the majority’s decision in the 2023 case. “… Today (just as in the Convention’s aftermath), thousands of Black Mississippians cannot vote due to §241’s operation.”
In the aftermath of the Callais decision, some Democrats have sought to assure their voters that the ruling doesn’t mean Republicans will necessarily have a lock on Congress now that white politicians can simply draw Black voters out of power. Democrats, they argue, can simply respond by diluting some of the majority-Black districts in states they control to create more Democratic-leaning districts, albeit whiter ones that are more likely to elect white candidates.
But that misses the point of the Voting Rights Act—which was never about helping give more power to one political party or another. It was about ensuring Black Americans had the opportunity to truly participate in democracy, not just by voting, but by having real opportunities to elect people of their choice to represent them. Democrats overcoming the partisan hurdles the Callais decision presents for them by electing a whiter bench of candidates doesn’t fix what the U.S. Supreme Court has broken. In many ways, it’s just another form of white Democrats selling out Black people.
America has never been colorblind, and it certainly isn’t now in this revanchist season we live in. I know that “woke” is out of vogue at the present time. But I don’t give a damn. Perhaps this sounds like a throwback to 2020 to some of you, but structural racism is real. It is a deeply embedded part of the social and governmental systems we all live in. We all live in a racist society that has taught us to see the world in terms of race, and trying to pretend it isn’t there doesn’t stop us from seeing race; it just allows us to pretend not to see racism.
Our institutions may deny this reality, whether for partisan or ideological reasons, but I refuse to do so because I still believe in fighting the monster known as racism. No, race is not a biological reality, but it is a social reality that our world has nevertheless been built around. I can’t change the U.S. Supreme Court’s mind. But both in my capacity as a journalist and in my capacity as an individual, I will continue to recognize the reality of structural racism in American life. I will continue to point it out. I will continue to report the truth regardless of which party engages in racist practices. And I will refuse to succumb to the comfortable lie of colorblindness.
Because that’s all it is: a lie to make people with my skin tone feel more comfortable with the advantages we gain from a racist society. A lie that enables modern-day Jim Crow.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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