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The End of the Voting Rights Act Isn’t Just a “Black Problem”

Preserving racial hierarchy remains one of most animating impulses in American political life.

Alain Stephens is an investigative reporter covering gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.

Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republican lawmakers across the South moved with remarkable speed to carve up Black constituencies and consolidate political power. Tennessee rushed to dismantle Memphis’s majority-Black district. Louisiana went further, postponing an ongoing election and moving to eliminate a majority-Black district that snakes for more than 200 miles, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. South Carolina and Georgia began maneuvering toward special sessions to redraw districts to be even more favorable to Republicans.

Democrats have warned that up to one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus could disappear, and Republicans aim to pick up as many as 15 House seats. 

The immediate reaction shattered the comforting fiction that America has somehow transcended race in its democratic life. The court may describe these protections as outdated relics of another era, but the swift political response revealed something older and more durable beneath the surface: preserving racial hierarchy remains one of the most potent organizing instincts in American politics.

The Supreme Court’s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is often framed as a tragedy that primarily affects Black Americans. It is that. But in a much larger sense, it also reveals how willing the country is to weaken its own democracy to keep these racialized systems of power intact.

It is no surprise that many of the former slaveholding states have once again moved to cheat the nation out of its democratic values. While most Confederate soldiers did not personally own slaves, the poison of white supremacy still convinced countless poor and working-class white men to fracture the country, slaughter their fellow Americans, and march themselves into mass death on the battlefield to preserve a racial order that benefited an elite planter class more than it ever benefited them.

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

After the Civil War, the South could have become a multiracial democracy built around poor Black and white laborers with overlapping economic interests. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans briefly helped build some of the South’s first systems of universal public education and expanded democratic participation across the region. But Southern elites responded by enacting Jim Crow laws — not merely to dominate Black Americans, but also to preempt any nascent democratic solidarity. As historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, wealthy Southern landowners understood that interracial democracy threatened the entire economic order that had sustained plantation rule. 

The system harmed Black Americans most brutally. White racists got what they wanted: segregation, lynchings, and Black exclusion from political life. But it also left millions of poor and working-class white Americans trapped inside oligarchic state structures, one-party political machines insulated from accountability and designed to serve landowners, industrialists, and political dynasties. As Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, found in his study of postbellum Southern disenfranchisement that poll taxes and literacy tests didn’t just suppress Black voters — they also........

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