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While John Lewis was beaten in Selma, while Freedom Riders died registering voters in Mississippi, and while President Lyndon Johnson muscled the Voting Rights Act through Congress, the boy who would grow up to eviscerate it rode bikes through tree-lined streets steps from the shore and was cosseted in private schools in a town built for white residents only.

Now that Chief Justice John Roberts has completed his decadeslong effort to undo the most successful civil rights legislation in American history, a simple question remains: Why? Is he a racist? What would lead a privileged graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School to dedicate so much of his life’s work to rolling back the victories of the Civil Rights Movement?

Maybe it’s as simple as this: Roberts was raised in the 1960s amid lily-white affluence in a tiny Indiana beach town where property deeds long forbade selling homes to Black or Jewish people. As a kid, he spent little time around Black people. From childhood to adulthood, he never lived anywhere, or close to anyone, who compelled him to feel empathy for the reality that experiencing freedom, like voting, wasn’t as easy for some Americans as it was for him. The chief justice has seemingly worn blinders for life.

Roberts was also a determined striver. For him, an education was always about getting the best job. This combination of isolation and ambition appears to have made him ready to embrace a trendy revanchist argument in early 1970s Republican circles: Any effort to combat racial discrimination was itself racial discrimination. The rising legal right wing battled civil rights by conjuring, and defending, a colorblind, race-neutral Constitution despite the country’s continuing struggle against anti-Black racism. It posited an America that never existed in place of the one that does.

Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when this idea was nothing but the sound of calculated white resentment, a well-off young man willing to embrace such a grievance could find the doors of power swinging open wide. Thanks to Roberts, this benighted nonsense is now the law of the land.

Any effort to understand Roberts’ dangerous combination of doggedness and blithe indifference must begin in ritzy Long Beach, Indiana, a wealthy enclave on the shores of Lake Michigan, home to some of the Chicago area’s wealthiest executives. His father, who helped manage the new Burns Harbor plant for Bethlehem Steel, chose to move his family half an hour northeast along the dunes rather than west where more Black Midwesterners lived. Deep into the 20th century, Long Beach advertised itself as a vacationland within a “highly restricted home community” where “all residents are Caucasian gentiles.”

During his 2005 confirmation hearings to become chief justice, Roberts described an idyllic heartland childhood lifted from a John Cougar Mellencamp song, all “endless fields” that were “punctuated by an isolated silo or a barn.” That was the same day Roberts unveiled another bit of brilliant PR, claiming that he would be a humble judge, comparing the job with that of a baseball umpire. A young man from Indiana could really go places if he appeared right out of central casting and could rebrand colorblind racism as just calling balls and strikes.

Maybe Roberts glimpsed farmland from the back seat on a drive to his exclusive prep school, but he wouldn’t have seen a barn or a John Deere combine next door to his parents’ lovely five-bedroom mock-Tudor home. There were no silos at La Lumiere, the private Catholic high school Roberts attended, an enclave within an enclave, located on a former lakefront estate. That institution was established in the early 1960s, just after the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, began........

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