Jim Crow lives.
Many Republicans are champing at the bit to dilute Black voters’ power after Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision in Callais v. Louisiana, in which the court’s conservative justices effectively allowed racist districts to exist unless a challenge to a district map can prove that its creators acted with racist intent.
Both before and after the ruling, Republicans — like anti-Black lawmakers in years past — showed their eagerness to use new maps to shore up conservatives’ political power. That’s particularly so in the South, where a majority of Black Americans live. There’s no credible moral justification for any of this, but that hasn’t stopped some folks from trying.
For example, Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams, a Black Republican who is running for Congress, touted the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday as he denounced districts specially drawn to counter racist gerrymandering.
“I’m a black Republican who currently represents a majority-white district in the Ohio State House and is running to represent a majority-white district in Congress,” Williams wrote on X. “The idea that black Americans need special districts carved out just for them is complete nonsense. It’s a violation of the law and blatantly unconstitutional.”
Some netizens and other observers noted in response that Williams represents an extremely gerrymandered district, drawn by Ohio Republicans.
Williams’ claim, despite being hypocritical and demonstrably false in a variety of ways, was promoted by Black conservatives. It aligns with talking points that some of Trump’s Black allies have used to downplay the existence of racism or obscure the racist impact of white conservatives’ deliberate dilution of Black voters’ power.
It’s a point I noted in 2023 while watching an episode of Sen. Tim Scott’s short-lived video series “America’s Starting Five,” which the South Carolinian co-hosted with several fellow Black Republicans in Congress: Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah and Rep. John James of Michigan.
In the first episode, Hunt said the fact that each of the five lawmakers represented a majority-white district “means that we’ve come a long way as a country and that we are literally being judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.”
I’m not so sure. What Hunt failed to mention is that nearly all of his co-panelists were elected in states where Republicans gerrymandered maps in their favor — often by diluting Black voters’ power. Even Michigan’s map, which was drawn by an independent districting commission, has drawn legal scrutiny over its impact on Black voters.
Black Republicans may point to their electoral victories in majority-white districts as evidence that racism is over, or that they are judged by the content of their character. But one could just as easily argue that it’s evidence of a system in which Black lawmakers can be elected as long as they show fealty to the agenda of an increasingly extreme — and anti-Black — MAGA movement.
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