The logic of the racist Supreme Court isn’t adding up
Close observers of the Supreme Court knew that the vast conservative majority was poised to assassinate what remained of the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision Louisiana v. Callais removed section 2 of the law, paving the way for racist gerrymandering because it is now racist to remedy racism. The decision is an affront to the history of the Voting Rights Act, an affront to American history, and an affront to mathematics.
The state of Louisiana, which is about 30 percent black, has six districts. Voting districts are drawn so that there are two precincts with a black majority. This represents two districts out of six; about 33 percent of districts, you could say. Because SCOTUS has deemed this map unconstitutional, the state of Louisiana will almost certainly redraw the maps so that there is only one majority-black district. So a 30 percent statewide population will now have their voting preferences reflected in 17 percent of the state’s districts.
Theoretically, voting is more subtle than race. Many different items at the municipal, state, and federal levels appear on any given ballot; no racial minority is monolithic and a community reflects a rich variety of social and political opinions. But perhaps because today’s Republicans are incapable of mitigating racism, about 83 percent of black American voters identify as Democrats — this is especially understandable in Southern states like Louisiana, an insurrectionist state readmitted to the Union in 1868 after being forced to clean up its shit by a civil war that killed about 750,000 Americans.
The Voting Rights Act’s provisions dealing with racial discrimination were not born out of a color-blind void, because U.S. history is not color-blind. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, the VRA, affirmative action – all part of a long struggle to correct the mathematical errors of our society. 33 percent is not the same as 30 percent, but it is much closer than 17. Section 2 of the VRA was part of a larger, interrelated project to get us closer to 1=1.
Since the signing of the Constitution, the math simply hasn’t worked out. States were given proportional voting power based on their population, but the same human beings who added numbers to the Electoral College were not eligible to vote. And in the slave South, the situation was even worse: each enslaved black American was counted as three-fifths of a person, and none of them were allowed to vote. But the founders understood that things were balanced since the composition of the Senate, which does not reflect the population at all, favored non-slave states. (Today we are still held hostage by this miserable calculation, where 575,000 Wyomingites have the same number of votes in the Senate as 39 million Californians.) Even after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, racist-controlled Southern states continued to design systems such as poll taxes, voting tests, and grandfathering provisions to block black voting. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dealt a major blow to these repeat offenders.
The United States sees stark racial disparities in generational wealth, educational achievement, average income, life expectancy, and infant mortality – disparities that are accentuated by unequal representation in government. The Civil Rights Movement sought to address these disparities on many fronts, tinkering with the interlocking systems that generated these bad numbers. Conservatives’ reaction to civil rights was a scathing defense of the status quo: instead of updating a buggy system, they would rather reinvent racial science to keep things exactly as they are.
For a brief period, a progressive SCOTUS aligned itself with the civil rights movement, building a body of jurisprudence that seemed to bend America’s moral arc toward justice. But then the court began to drift to the right. And in 1987, faced with statistical evidence that the death penalty was applied disparately by race, the court hesitated to do the math. In McCleskey v. Kemplawyers challenged the death penalty based on a statistical study of 2,000 homicide cases in Georgia that showed a clearly fucked-up pattern:
Baldus found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70 percent of cases involving black defendants and white victims; 32% of cases involving white defendants and white victims; 15% of cases involving black defendants and black victims; and 19% of cases involving white defendants and black victims.
“Statistics, at most, can show only the likelihood that a particular factor influenced certain decisions,” the court wrote at the time, reluctant to see the numbers for itself. Calculating disparate impacts has begun to go out of fashion in law; Although dictionary fetishists like Justice Antonin Scalia mimicked objectivity by zooming in on words, numbers were left aside.
In 2017, when presented with statistical evidence of gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “sociological gibberish.” His talent for arithmetic may not be feigned: a Harvard history graduate, he made significant arithmetic errors in public and was baffled by diagrams in court. (“It looks pretty complicated. There are a lot of arrows,” he said of a software patent during oral arguments in Alice vs. CLS.) But his truculent attitude toward numbers is convenient. Why bother learning when ignorance is so rewarding? Gerrymandering continues to benefit his political party. His previous attack on the VRA – a 2013 decision gutting other provisions – resulted in voter roll purges and discriminatory voter ID requirements that fueled a racial turnout gap.
The United States is a quagmire of dependencies and outdated code, a shit show riddled with technical debt. We all know that districts and the Electoral College have ensured that our votes do not count equally; Rather than bringing us closer to parity, America’s elite institutions have dragged us further into uncountable hell. You don’t need a STEM degree to be offended by the way the system is designed. This is an objectively stupid way to organize a society.
For a while, fixes like the Voting Rights Act were just enough to keep things running; Callais takes us further into a world that no sane person wants to live in, a society that is fundamentally meaningless to people, where nonviolent participation in the democratic project seems futile, and where change within the system seems impossible. In this world, things don’t really add up, and 1 doesn’t equal 1.
