Jamelle Bouie writes:

Descriptive representation, as it is known, is not perfect; race alone does not guarantee that a lawmaker will act in the interest of his or her community. But the record suggests that in places where racial polarization is the norm, where the legacy of Jim Crow segregation shapes the political and social landscape, the opportunity provided by a majority-minority district can mean the difference between some representation and none at all.

For the Roberts court, however, these districts are little more than a “racial entitlement,” to borrow a phrase from Justice Antonin Scalia. In the court’s view, you may have the right to vote, but you do not have the right to representation, and certainly no right to representation that supports “racial classification” — as if the government is the reason that Black Americans see themselves as a discrete and particular community — or outweighs a state’s purported right to engage in partisan gerrymandering.

In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal level. And as long as there isn’t clear evidence of intentional discrimination — a standard that would have been difficult to prove at the height of Jim Crow, which rested on the same fiction of facial neutrality — it passes constitutional muster. In fact, lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are already planning special legislative sessions to apply the court’s ruling and erase the majority-minority districts in their states.

At a minimum, the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were written, passed and ratified to end the subordination of Black Americans and ensure their representation in the political community. It is perverse that this Supreme Court has used both amendments to facilitate what might become the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state level since the end of Reconstruction and the “redemption” of the South. Words meant to secure the political equality of all Americans are being raised as weapons to deprive them of just that. [Continue reading…]