Close watchers of the Supreme Court knew that successive administrations were about to kill what was left of the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision on Louisiana v. Calais lowered Section 2 of the law, paving the way for racism, because now it is racism to correct discrimination. This 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 statistics.
The state of Louisiana, which is about 30 percent Black, has six counties. Voting districts are drawn so that there are two majority-Black districts. That’s two out of six districts; about 33 percent in the states, you might say. Because the SCOTUS ruled this map unconstitutional, the state of Louisiana will likely redraw the maps so there is only one majority Black state. So 30 percent of the state’s population will now be shown their voting preferences in 17 percent of the state’s constituencies.
In theory, voting is more subtle than race. Many different items at the municipal, state, and federal levels appear on any given ballot; no ethnic minority is a single person, and society will reflect diverse social and political views. But perhaps because today’s Republicans can’t get rid of racism, about 83 percent of black American voters identify as Democrats – this is especially understandable in Southern states like Louisiana, a rebellious state that was returned to the Union in 1868 after being forced to correct the brutality of the civil war that killed somewhere around 00000 Americans.
The provisions of the Voting Rights Act addressing racial discrimination did not exist in a color vacuum, because the history of the United States is color blind. The Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the VRA, affirmative action – all of these things are part of the long struggle to fix the broken equations of our society. 33 percent is not the same as 30 percent, but it seems more impressive than 17 percent. Phase 2 of the VRA was part of a larger, integrated project to bring us closer to 1 = 1.
Since the signing of the Constitution, the numbers don’t add up. States were given equal electoral power based on their population, but the same people who added numbers to the Electoral College were not eligible to vote. And in the slave South, it 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 saw things as balanced since the composition of the Senate, which did not reflect the population at all, favored the non-slaveholding states. (Today, we are still gripped by this sad statistic, 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, the segregationist Southern states continued to design programs such as poll taxes, voting tests, and grandfather clauses to keep blacks out. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dealt a heavy hand to these repeat offenders.
The United States sees clear racial disparities in generational wealth, educational outcomes, median income, life expectancy, and infant mortality — disparities that widen due to unequal representation in government. The Civil Rights Movement sought to redress this disparity on many fronts, examining the interconnected systems that produced these dismal numbers. The radical pushback of civil rights was the first defense of the status quo – instead of updating the buggy system, they’d rather reinvent the science of race to keep things the way they are.
For a brief window in time, the progressive SCOTUS sided with the Civil Rights Movement, creating a body of case law that seemed to bend the American moral arc of justice. But then the court began to drift. And in 1987, when faced with statistical evidence that the death penalty was used disproportionately by race, the court disagreed with the statistics. In McCleskey v. Camplawyers challenged the death penalty on the basis of a statistical study of 2,000 murders in Georgia that showed a clear pattern:
Baldus found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70% of cases involving black defendants and white victims; 32% of crimes involved white defendants and white victims; 15% of crimes involved black defendants and black victims; and 19% of crimes involving white defendants and black victims.
“Statistics, in particular, may only indicate the probability that a certain factor enters into certain decisions,” the court wrote at the time, unwilling to see the numbers for themselves. Disparate impact statistics began to fall out of fashion in law; just as lexicographers like Justice Antonin Scalia showed disrespect by rounding off strong words, the numbers were set aside.
In 2017, when evidence was presented on Wisconsin homicide statistics, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” His calculations may not be pretentious – a Harvard historian, he has made huge math mistakes in public and confused drawings in court. (“It looks very complicated. There are a lot of arrows,” he said of the patent software in oral arguments on. Alice v. CLS.) But his attitude of not listening to the numbers is justified. Why bother learning when ignorance is so beneficial? Gerrymandering continues to benefit his political party. His previous attack on the VRA — a 2013 ruling that removed some provisions — led to purges of voter rolls and voter ID requirements that fueled the racial voter gap.
The United States is a mass of dependencies and outdated code, a shitshow full of technical debt. We all know that the districts and the Electoral College have done it so that our votes can be counted equally; rather than bringing us closer to equality, America’s elite institutions have led us to countless hells. You don’t need a STEM degree to be offended by the way the system is designed. This is a stupid way to organize a community.
For a while, passages like the Voting Rights Act were enough to keep everything moving; Callais it takes us to a world where no sane person wants to live, a society that makes no sense to people, where non-violent participation in the democratic project seems futile and change within the system seems impossible. In this world, things don’t really add up, and 1 does not equal 1.
