The Supreme Court's 'White Rage'

As historian Carol Anderson warned years ago, Black progress triggers white rage.

Map: Wiki Commons Twotwofourtysix

It’s happening again. Whenever Black people make political, social, or economic progress, white people come along to try and stop it. That’s what just happened when the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, ruled against a Black congressional district in Louisiana.

The NAACP called it a “devastating blow,” and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan warned that “minority representation in government institutions” is about to “sharply decline.”

How does she know? Because it’s happened before.

Louisiana’s population is one-third Black, and Black people hold two of the six seats in Congress, or one third of the state’s congressional delegation. That seems fair, right? But today’s decision will likely eliminate the congressional district represented by Black Congressman Cleo Fields. And it opens the floodgates for other former Confederate states to eliminate Black members of Congress as well.

Hours after the Court’s ruling, Florida lawmakers approved a new gerrymandered map, which would have previously prompted federal scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act.

The sad part is we’ve been here before. In 1877, after the 15th Amendment guaranteed Black people the right to vote, there were eight Black members in Congress. But as Reconstruction ended and federal troops withdrew from the South, white people began to attack Black voting rights. And by 1901, there were no Black members left in Congress.

Historian Carol Anderson calls it “white rage.” We saw it when the Voting Rights Act was passed, and we’re seeing it again now.

When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, racist white Southerners felt their party betrayed them. They fled the Democratic Party and became Republicans. And since that time, no Democratic candidate for president has ever won the white vote.

It happened again in 2008, when America elected Barack Obama as its first Black president, and many white voters worried about their decline in political power. That’s why the majority of white voters did not support Obama in either of his two presidential elections.

But by 2008, white voters could no longer switch parties because they had already aligned with the Republican Party that opposed Obama. So they decided to attack the law that helped Obama get elected. In June of 2013, one year after Obama’s re-election, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in the case of Shelby County v. Holder.

The same day, officials in Texas announced the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law. And since that time, states have enacted hundreds of new laws to make it harder to vote.

But today’s case is about power, not law. This is the endgame of a six-decade-long campaign to destroy Black voting power. They don’t want us to vote. They don’t want us in Congress. And they damn sure don’t want another Black president.

They fear our vote more than anything else. So let’s give them a reason to.