Back in 2009, Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, called for a "national conversation on race," and depicted America as a "nation of cowards" for allegedly having not yet had one.

The call, alas, didn't amount to much, since it quickly became apparent that Holder and other Democrats were the real cowards because they didn't want any discussion of race that didn't already fit into their established narrative, which essentially blamed all problems afflicting Black people on continuing white racism of various sorts ("structural," "systemic," unconscious, etc.). Smearing white Americans as still racist for the purpose of keeping Black voters still wed to the Democratic Party was the extent of the brief, despite the election of America's first Black president the previous year with mostly white votes.

The reaction in liberal circles to the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais, which declared the practice of racial gerrymandering unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's "equal protection" clause, suggests that little has changed over the past 17 years: the left still equates the goal of the original civil rights movement — colorblindness in public policy — with racism, however peculiar the logic involved.

As National Review's Noah Rothman noted with regard to the left's condemnation of that ruling, "We have reached the point at which explicitly prohibiting racial........

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