The supreme court on Wednesday paved the way for racial discrimination in voting, 60 years after Martin Luther King Jr and thousands of other movement leaders bled, marched and mobilized for Congress to outlaw it. This is a break-glass outcome for what was already a severely weakened Voting Rights Act (VRA), and it will reshape the future of political representation at all levels of government, in Louisiana and beyond.

Section 2 of the VRA has served as the country’s primary shield against racial vote dilution – prohibiting voting practices that leave minority voters with less opportunity than others to elect candidates of their choice, such as racially gerrymandered district maps. The court’s decision has torn it away.

Some will celebrate this as a victory for a “colorblind” constitution. But ignoring racial discrimination does not make it go away; you cannot cure a disease by refusing to diagnose it. Without section 2 or the ability to respond to patterns of discrimination, there is little to stop future maps from returning to what they looked like during Jim Crow. For decades, the VRA gave civil rights advocates and the federal government powerful tools to stop racial discrimination in voting. In today’s........

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