Nothing is new and history repeats. When the Supreme Court delivered a death blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act last month, endangering the project of multiracial democracy that flowed from the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, it did so by using many of the same logical—and illogical—devices the high court deployed to help end the first Reconstruction. From the late 19th century, the Roberts Court borrowed the false naïveté and judicial supremacy that define some of that era’s darkest opinions.

There are obvious echoes between Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion finished off the VRA, and the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision, in which the court blessed Jim Crow. The Roberts Court is in many respects a neoconfederate court, and it repeatedly applies the tactics and ideas of the 1880s and 1890s court, whose members likewise could not abide a robust vision of equality.

The majority blinded itself to reality.

In the 1896 case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law separating white and Black rail passengers was constitutional, affirming the principle of separate-but-equal. Plessy would eventually be overruled by Brown v. Board of Education and other 1950s cases that found separate-but-equal to be inherently unequal. Whereas the court, and the country, came to understand that separate was not equal, the Plessy majority found the railcar segregation mandate to be a race-neutral law that applied fairly to both white and Black people. Plessy rejected the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” as Justice Henry Brown wrote for the 7-1 majority. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

With these words, the majority blinded itself to the reality that, in a white supremacist society, separation would obviously be unequal, and confer a badge of inferiority upon the people forcibly segregated. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter, pointed out the fallacy of assuming Louisiana’s law was innocent. “The real meaning of such legislation” is that the “colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in the public coaches occupied by white citizens,” Harlan wrote in his famous dissent. Though this was patently clear, the majority would not admit it.

Instead, the Plessy majority somehow ascribed reasonable motives to the rail car law, finding them in line with the “established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order.” Further, the opinion noted the court must be deferential to the legislature’s reasons for passing the law.

More than a century later, Louisiana enacted a different law, a new congressional map that gave the state’s Black residents a majority in just one of six districts, even though the state’s population is a third Black. Under the decades-old understanding of the VRA, multiple courts ordered Louisiana to draw a second Black-majority district to afford Black people the same opportunity to elect representatives of their choice as everyone else. Louisiana complied, only to be sued by non-Black plaintiffs who argued that the map discriminated against them. In Louisiana v. Callais, the high court’s Republican-appointed majority agreed, striking down the map and........

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