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The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais undermines another key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed more than 60 years ago with the intent of protecting Black Americans’ voting rights and political representation.

With SCOTUS ruling majority-minority districts as a form of discrimination against non-Black people, Republican-led states are poised to dilute Black political power in a manner echoing the Jim Crow era when white southerners retook power from elected Black lawmakers and neutralized Black Americans’ voting rights for multiple generations. During Reconstruction, hundreds of African Americans won elected office as thousands of newly emancipated citizens engaged in the electoral process. The number of Black officeholders declined following Reconstruction’s end in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan launched terror campaigns against Black communities in efforts to blunt Black political power. Many whites also justified their attempts at undermining Black power by claiming African Americans were corrupt and thus not fit to participate in self-governance.

White theft of African Americans’ civil rights and economic power accompanied the destruction of Black political influence following the end of Reconstruction. White southerners moved to pass laws instituting segregation in education, public accommodations, and in the private sector. Jim Crow laws also entailed enforcing policies preventing Black Americans from voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

One difference between the racial dictatorship of Jim Crow and the burgeoning racial regime is the contemporary manifestation of oppression is grounded in what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “colorblind racism,” or non-racialized actions and policies that reinforce Black and Brown marginalization. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative majority, justified invalidating Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder by pointing to the “great strides” in Black participation in electoral politics. Justice Samuel Alito echoed Roberts in his opinion for Louisiana v. Callais: “First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.”

However, eliminating minority-majority districts threatens to leave millions of Black Americans without representation that reflects their interests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis........

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