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There is a particular kind of violence the U.S. Supreme Court majority prefers because it can deny it while it is happening. This has never been more obvious than in its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
Louisiana is soaked in what was done to Black people to make the state exist, and there is no honest way to talk about this case without starting there. Louisiana, like every other Southern state, built its wealth and political order through a system that treated human life as something to be violated and exploited and then insisted on calling that arrangement natural. The violence that enforced Black subjugation was not hidden in the way people now prefer to imagine. It was visible, repeated, justified, and graphic. And when enslavement ended, those lessons did not disappear so much as settle into new forms, into politics that could be controlled, participation that could be managed, rules that could be defended, and eventually into legislative maps that could accomplish stealthily what open terror once did in daylight.
The modern version of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that the court struck down last week was written for a world in which discrimination rarely announces itself cleanly, a world in which it can be diffuse, embedded, cumulative, and still devastating in its effects. Congress knew that. By its terms, the statute asks courts to look at patterns, outcomes, and how race and politics actually operate together to decide whether the voting process is equally open in any meaningful sense.
Yet the majority treats Louisiana’s mapmaking choices that offend Section 2 as if they arrived unmarked by history. The rest follows from that shift. The statute is pulled back toward an intent requirement—despite the clear commands of Congress—and the burden placed on plaintiffs becomes something closer to a demand that they isolate discrimination in a form so blatant that it rarely exists in the present. The consequences have been immediate and devastating. On Thursday, Tennessee carved up the state’s only majority-Black district, breaking the city of Memphis, whose population is 63 percent Black, into three districts where the city’s votes will be completely diluted by surrounding mostly white populations.
The 15th Amendment says that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race. It does not say that denial must be intentional in the narrow sense the court now prefers. It does not say that only acts taken explicitly because of race count. It speaks in terms of effect as well as purpose. A right can be denied outright, or it can be abridged, reduced, made less meaningful in practice while remaining formally available.
Congress understood that in 1982, when, using its enforcement power under the 15th Amendment, it amended Section 2. After a prior court in Mobile v. Bolden demanded an intent-only standard, Congress rejected that standard and wrote a results-based test into the statute because discrimination had adapted and the law needed to reach the ways it functioned in practice. Nothing in the 15th Amendment prevents Congress from doing that. There is no coherent way to reconcile the court’s new rule with the text Congress wrote. The court’s approach cannot accommodate that text without rewriting it. And so it does, not openly, but by insisting that the Constitution will not allow the statute to mean what it says.
The new standard asks Black voters to prove discrimination in a form American racism has not in a long time been careless enough to provide, then treats that absence as confirmation that nothing is wrong. That is, of course, not how intent works in the law. It never has. Courts infer intent every day from what people do, from the consequences they know will follow, from patterns that repeat with such consistency that coincidence is no longer a plausible explanation. They look at sequence, at departures from ordinary practice, at whether the outcome was not just foreseeable but effectively guaranteed. Here, all of that is pushed to the margins.
The majority’s opinion entombs one of the greatest democratic achievements in American history across dozens of pages, layered with citations, careful phrasing, and the posture of seriousness that courts rely on to signal authority. You read it and you can feel the effort, the accumulation of language, and the insistence that this was a difficult case. But it is hard not to step back from it and see something much simpler taking shape underneath all that ink. Because when you strip away the scaffolding, when you set aside the tone and the length and the performance of rigor, what remains is not complicated at all. It is a conclusion about who gets to matter in the political life of this country and under what conditions. It is a statement, dressed up in doctrine, that Black voters may participate but cannot insist that their participation carry power. It is striking, in that light, how much work the opinion must do to say something so straightforward.
At the end of the day, no one should be surprised by this majority. The opinion makes more sense once you stop treating it as an isolated exercise in statutory interpretation and start seeing it as part of a much longer judicial pattern, one that repeatedly acknowledges racism in theory while narrowing the circumstances under which the law will actually recognize or remedy it. The same demand that discrimination arrive in a form so explicit, so concentrated, so undeniable that modern systems almost never produce it that way anymore.
Take Samuel Alito, who also authored the 5–4 decision in the 2006 case Vance v. Ball State. The plaintiff in that case, Maetta Vance, was a Black woman catering employee who described years of racial hostility in the workplace: slurs, intimidation, threats, sabotage, and an assault. The court majority did not seriously engage the reality of racial power in that workplace. It narrowed the definition of who counts as a “supervisor” for purposes of employer liability, effectively concluding that much of what Vance experienced could not trigger the same level of employer liability because the person tormenting her was not in the right space on the organizational chart.
And then there is Amy Coney Barrett, who as a circuit judge authored an opinion concluding that a Black employee who was called a “stupid-ass n—” by a supervisor still had not shown a sufficiently hostile work environment. For her, even explicit racial degradation becomes negotiable once filtered through this judicial imagination. Racism is acknowledged abstractly, then discounted in application.
That pattern runs through the entire majority opinion John Roberts wrote in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 decision that dismantled the other key plank of the Voting Rights Act. There, the court declared that the South had changed enough that the VRA’s strongest protections were no longer justified, only for states to move immediately toward restrictions those protections once blocked.
For his part, Clarence Thomas has spent years arguing not merely that parts of the act should be narrowed, but that much of modern voting rights doctrine itself rests on fundamentally illegitimate premises, repeatedly treating efforts to confront racial exclusion as unconstitutional racial favoritism.
And Neil Gorsuch, whose textualism in Bostock v. Clayton County was celebrated as proof that statutory text still mattered, signs on to an opinion here that drains Section 2 of the very thing Congress unmistakably wrote into it.
Finally, Brett Kavanaugh, who has acknowledged the enduring importance of the VRA in prior cases, joins an opinion that treats one of its core protections as constitutionally suspect the moment it meaningfully disrupts existing political power.
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These same instincts saturate this opinion. The same refusal to grapple with discrimination as it is actually lived and experienced. The same retreat into abstraction and formalism whenever acknowledging the full reality of anti-Black racism would require meaningful intervention. Of course, a court like this would struggle to recognize vote dilution against Black voters unless someone practically engraved racial animus into the map itself. And even then, it is difficult to imagine this majority acknowledging what years of litigation, testimony, expert evidence, statistical analysis, historical records, and detailed factual findings from lower courts lay bare about how states like Louisiana have shaped electoral systems to keep Black voters politically subordinate. There is always another doctrinal off-ramp available because the standard is constructed to keep recognition perpetually out of reach.
At some point, we must stop pretending not to see what is plainly happening. Stop wrapping all of this in the language of mystery or complexity as though the through line is too difficult to identify. The instinct, especially among lawyers and commentators, is always to soften it, to insist that the doctrine cuts in different directions, that the justices are merely following competing methodological commitments that somehow, again and again, produce the same racial consequences. There is a kind of professional politeness that demands we discuss each case in isolation so no one has to say aloud what the cumulative pattern reveals. But they are not entitled to that level of denial. A court that repeatedly narrows the mechanisms available to challenge racial exclusion in our democracy, repeatedly heightens the burden for Black plaintiffs, and repeatedly reframes structural inequality into something legally invisible is not wandering accidentally into these outcomes.
This court is not abetting anti-Blackness by mistake. It is not stumbling into outcomes that repeatedly diminish Black political power across the South and the country through some unfortunate series of neutral doctrinal choices. It is doing exactly what it appears to be doing: constructing a constitutional framework that recognizes racial discrimination only in forms narrow enough to preserve most modern manifestations of it untouched.
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The reason so many people struggle to say that plainly is because saying it forces a confrontation far larger than this case. It requires admitting that the law is not standing outside these systems neutrally observing them. It is helping build them. It is deciding what forms of racial harm will and won’t count, what evidence will and won’t matter, what level of exclusion our highest court in the land is willing to tolerate, and who must bear the burden of proving that tolerance has been exceeded.
It’s unclear what comes next beyond what is already unfolding. Since Callais was issued, states have swiftly begun to delay elections and redraw lines, carving up Black voters community by community. It is hard to hold on to hope in a moment like this. What feels clearer is the obligation not to soften what is happening, not to translate it into something more comfortable than it is. The only option is to know the history that shaped this result, to speak plainly, to name what this decision does without distance, and to keep Black voters and Black Americans at the center of that account in terms that cannot be blurred. Not because that alone will change what the court has done, but because anything less would finish the work for them.
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