With supreme court ruling, Republicans able to marginalize Black political power

The Voting Rights Act was a political peace compact written in John Lewis’s blood.

The Callais v Landry decision by the US supreme court, which set aside much of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, whitewashed that blood from history, along with that of thousands of other Americans who fought segregationist white supremacists at lunch counters and bus stations and courthouses for political equality.

“This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for,” the NAACP wrote in a statement following the decision.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act has created a Congress that better reflects the ethnic and racial diversity of the country. But it also established a racial taxonomy in politics that associates non-white voters with Democrats.

With the Callais decision, which ruled that litigants must prove racial motivations in redistricting, Republican majorities will be able to marginalize Black political power across the US and especially in the south, where voting is highly racially polarized.

Gerrymandering works because voters of one party can easily be identified in geographic concentrations. The court concluded that race cannot be considered when drawing district lines; mapmakers need only consider political advantage. But if non-white voters disproportionately choose Democrats, and those voters are concentrated in easily gerrymandered clusters, then it follows that Republican policymakers benefit from racial politics that rely on these clusters, because that makes it easier to draw lines disempowering Democrats.

At the start of the 2025-26 session, 62 of the 435 members of Congress were Black, the largest number on record and the first time in American history that Black representation in Congress had been equal to its representation in the American population. Fifty-six Hispanic representatives serve in Congress, as do 21 Asian Americans.

Four Black House members are Republicans, which also closely matches Black political demography. All four of those Republicans are retiring this year, either to run for higher office or because their district has been gerrymandered out from underneath them.

More than half of Democratic representation in Congress is non-white. Less than 10 percent of Republican representation is non-white.

“Our parties are so racially split, racial gerrymandering can use the fig leaf of partisan gerrymandering,” said Carol Anderson, chair of African American studies at Emory University. “It allows them to go full-born hog-wild.”

When looking at a map of voting patterns in the United States, we find islands of blue surrounded by vast oceans of red. Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in densely populated urban areas. Black voters also tend to be concentrated in densely populated urban areas, because suburban communities have a legacy of zoning laws making affordable housing harder to build there.