On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial gerrymandering in federal and state elections, and disenfranchised minority voters throughout the country. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged, claiming it to be unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, in which he stated that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race,” and identified the question before the court to be “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.” Here, Justice Alito was talking about discrimination against white voters. His view, and the view of five other Justices on the Court, is that attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory – against white people.
The lawsuit arose out of the state of Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map following the 2020 census. When they adopted a new map in 2022, it contained one majority-Black district out of the six total districts in the state, notwithstanding that Black voters make up one third of Louisiana’s population. A group of Black voters brought a lawsuit alleging that the new map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in voting. They won this lawsuit, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the state to draw up a new map by January 2024. The State’s new map created an additional majority-Black district, leading to the election of Cleo Fields, a Black Democratic candidate who had previously represented a majority-Black district in the 1990s. In response, a lawsuit was filed by a group of “non-African American voters” who claimed the new 2024 map violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by sorting voters based on race. The Supreme Court took up the case in 2025.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was a landmark statute enacted at the height of the civil rights movement to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, but particularly in the South. It has subsequently been amended five times by Congress to expand its protections. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits governments from imposing any rule that “results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color,” or their membership in a language minority group.
In his opinion, Alito claimed that the test for determining whether a districting map violated Section 2 of the VRA, as set forth in the earlier Supreme Court decision in Thornberg v. Gingles, “does not require abandonment,” but that the Supreme Court must “update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago.” In Alito’s view, this “update” requires that the test now “focus on evidence that has more than a remote bearing on what the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits: present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.” In other words, in order to successfully challenge a redistricting map under Section 2, the challenger must have evidence of the government’s intent to racially discriminate, regardless of what discriminatory effects may occur. Alito justified this “update” on his assertion that “social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” suggesting racial discrimination is a thing of the past, and claimed that when the VRA was enacted “the Nation had faced nearly a century of “entrenched racial discrimination in voting,” but that “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.”
At the same time, Alito defended racial gerrymandering as partisan and not racial, claiming that most Black people support Democrats “because race and politics are so intertwined.” In other words, discriminating against Black voters is permissible because they are Democrats.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a 48-page dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she observed that [t]he Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.” And only Congress, Kagan wrote, can “say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court.”
Kagan rejected Alito’s claim that he had merely made “updates” to the law surrounding Section 2, charging that the changes would in fact “eviscerate the law, so that it will not remedy even” classic cases of vote dilution, and that the majority had “formulate[d] new proof requirements for plaintiffs alleging vote dilution” without any basis in the language of Section 2 or the Constitution. She also pointed out that when Congress amended Section 2 of the VRA in 1982, it did so specifically to override a prior Supreme Court decision holding that Section 2 prohibited only intentional discrimination, and did so to ensure that application of Section 2 would turn on the presence of discretionary effects, and not proof of intent to racially discriminate, which is almost impossible to prove since the government can – regardless of its true motivation – just claim it took action for partisan reasons (i.e., to elect republicans), rather than for racially discriminatory reasons. “Today’s decision,” Kagan wrote, “returns Section 2 to what it was” before the 1982 amendment. “Now, as then, vote-dilution plaintiffs will have to show more than vote dilution: They will have to show, as well, race-based motive. Now, as then, that requirement will make success in their suits nearly impossible.”
In her conclusion, Kagan omitted the traditional “respectfully,” writing only, “I dissent.”
Just a day after the opinion was issued, many states are already rushing to redraw their congressional districts in a manner that will weaken or destroy Black voting power. What Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and the other four conservative justices have purposefully enabled is a country where white people can maintain political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The Supreme Court and its supporters may call this “color-blindness,” but it is not the color-blindness that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of, it is instead a perverse and disingenuous use of the phrase to maintain a racial hierarchy by means of a superficially neutral justification.