Close watchers of the Supreme Court knew that the conservative supermajority was about to murder what was left of the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais took down Section 2 of the law, clearing 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 the history of the United States, and an affront to math.
The state of Louisiana, which is around 30 percent Black, has six districts. The voting districts are drawn so that there are two majority-Black districts. That is two out of six districts; approximately 33 percent of the districts, you might say. Because SCOTUS has ruled this map unconstitutional, the state of Louisiana will almost certainly redraw the maps so there is only one majority-Black district. So a statewide population of 30 percent will now have their voting preferences reflected in 17 percent of the state’s districts.
Theoretically, voting is more subtle than race. Many different things at municipal, state, and federal levels appear on any given ballot; no racial minority is a monolith, and a community will reflect a rich variety of social and political views. But possibly because modern-day Republicans are incapable of toning down the racism, around 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 fix its bullshit by a civil war that killed somewhere around 750,000 Americans.
The provisions of the Voting Rights Act addressing racial discrimination did not come about in a colorblind vacuum, because the history of the United States is not colorblind. The Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, VRA, affirmative action — all of these things are part of a long struggle to correct the broken math of our society. 33 percent is not the same as 30 percent, but it’s a damn sight closer to it than 17 is. The VRA’s Section 2 was part of a vast, interlocking project to get us closer to 1 = 1.
From the signing of the Constitution, the math simply did not add up. States were given proportional electoral power based on their populations, but the same human beings that added numbers to the Electoral College were not eligible to vote. And in the slaveholding South, it got 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 figured things evened out since the composition of the Senate, which doesn’t reflect population at all, favored the non-slaveholding states. (Today, we are still held hostage by this miserable math, where 575,000 Wyomingites have the same number of Senate votes as 39 million Californians.) Even after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, racist-controlled Southern states kept designing systems like poll taxes, voting tests, and grandfather provisions to block the Black vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 took a heavy hand to these repeat offenders.
The United States sees clear racial disparities in generational wealth, educational outcomes, average income, life expectancy, and infant mortality — disparities that are heightened by unequal representation in government. The Civil Rights Movement sought to fix these disparities on many fronts, tinkering with the interlocking systems that generated these bad numbers. The conservative backlash to civil rights was a bootlicking defense of the status quo — instead of updating a buggy system, they’d rather reinvent race science to keep things exactly the way they are.
For a brief window in time, a progressive SCOTUS was aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, building a body of case law that seemed to bend America’s moral arc toward justice. But then the court began to drift rightward. And in 1987, when confronted with statistical evidence that the death penalty was disparately applied by race, the court balked at math. In McCleskey v. Kemp, lawyers challenged the death penalty on the basis of a statistical study of 2,000 homicide cases in Georgia that showed a glaringly fucked-up pattern:
Baldus found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70% of the cases involving black defendants and white victims; 32% of the cases involving white defendants and white victims; 15% of the cases involving black defendants and black victims; and 19% of the cases involving white defendants and black victims.
“Statistics, at most, may show only a likelihood that a particular factor entered into some decisions,” wrote the court at the time, unwilling to see the numbers for themselves. The math of disparate impact began to fall out of fashion in law; even as dictionary fetishists like Justice Antonin Scalia pantomimed objectivity by zooming in real hard on words, numbers were sidelined.
In 2017, when presented with statistical evidence of gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” His innumeracy might not be feigned — a Harvard history major, he’s made major arithmetic errors in public and has been baffled by diagrams in court. (“It looks pretty complicated. There are a lot of arrows,” he said of a software patent in oral arguments in Alice v. CLS.) But his truculent attitude toward numbers is convenient. Why bother to learn 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 morass of dependencies and outdated code, a shitshow riddled with technical debt. We all know that districting and the Electoral College have made it so that our votes do not count equally; rather than getting us closer to parity, America’s elite institutions have taken us further into an innumerate hell. You don’t need a STEM degree to be offended by how the system is designed. This is an objectively stupid way to organize a society.
For a while, patches like the Voting Rights Act were just enough to keep the whole thing trucking along; Callais takes us further into a world no sane person wants to live in, a society that fundamentally doesn’t make sense to people, where nonviolent participation in the democratic project seems futile and change within the system looks to be impossible. In this world, things just don’t really add up, and 1 does not equal 1.