When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down their verdict in Louisiana v. Callais, the unelected, conservative majority put the Voting Rights Act through the shredder — gutting the provisions that protected Black voters from being carved up among majority-white districts. This gave a green light to a racist redistricting bonanza, with Republicans redrawing voter maps to split up Black voters and weaken their voting power.
The Democrats’ response? “Two can play at that game” gerrymandering, where geographically absurd districts are drawn up to benefit one political party. They should be summoning a mass protest movement to stop Republican assaults. Instead, they’re accelerating the downward spiral of democracy.
Real democracy is incompatible with our monopolized, capitalist system, which concentrates power in the executive and judicial branches to keep a tiny billionaire minority in power.
It took a Civil War and a century more of bloodstained struggle led by Black Americans to guarantee the right to vote. It will take the same militancy and tenacity of civil rights leaders throughout U.S. history to stop the return of Jim Crow and white supremacist subjugation.
To achieve it, we need to come together as they did in Selma, with a broad coalition of freedom fighters from across the movements. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “we’re not begging on our knees … we’re demanding the ballot!”
