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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........

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