SCOTUS Ruling Against Race-Based Gerrymandering Reaffirms America’s Colorblind Constitution
Curtis Hill
Self-government strengthens when it treats citizens as equals under the law, not as members of competing racial tribes.
All blacks apparently vote the same. It doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, educated or unschooled, urban or rural — if they’re black, their voting patterns are only defined by their blackness. At least that’s what they were saying in Louisiana, until the latest U.S. Supreme Court decision pulled the curtain down on “majority-minority” gerrymandering.
In a clear 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s SB8 map — which intentionally created a second majority-black congressional district — an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the court’s conservatives and with a strong concurrence from Justice Thomas (joined by Justice Gorsuch), held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not require the state to draw that extra district. Without such a requirement, there was no compelling interest to justify making race the predominant factor in map-drawing. The lower court’s decision striking the map was affirmed.
This decision directly attacks the racist stereotyping that has infected redistricting for too long. For decades, mapmakers have operated on the crude assumption that black voters (and Latino voters) form a monolithic bloc whose political preferences are dictated first and foremost, if not solely, by skin color. They have treated minority communities as predictable voting machines rather than as individuals with diverse views shaped by education, income, values, faith, and personal experience.
Louisiana’s mapmakers did exactly that: They sorted people into districts based on racial headcounts to engineer “majority-minority” outcomes, presuming that black voters would think and vote as a uniform group. Joe Biden even publicly chastised blacks as not being black if they didn’t vote Democrat.
That is the opposite of equality. It revives the very racial sorting the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause was written to stop. The Constitution demands that the government treat every person as an individual, not as a racial category. Yet Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as twisted in practice, has been used to mandate race-conscious districting that elevates group identity over individual dignity. It assumes black voters are interchangeable and that their interests can only be protected by carving out safe racial enclaves. This isn’t protecting voting rights; it’s enforcing a soft form of racial separatism dressed up as so-called social justice.