The Logic of Supremacy

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act yesterday.

And many are angry. But being angry is not enough.

This ruling is a stain. The Roberts Court is building its own Dred Scott decision, a shameful chapter that history will not forget.

But I want to talk about something harder.

Here is what the Court actually believes: race only exists when Black and brown people are in the room. Majority-Black districts are racial gerrymanders. Majority-white districts are just districts. Policies that produce white institutions, white cabinets, white maps — those are neutral. Policies that produce anything else — those are the intervention.

That logic is wrong. And many people who oppose this decision use it anyway.

They say “why does everything have to be about race.” They say “reverse racism.” They say “I don’t see color.”

They oppose the ruling. But they accept the frame.

That is not enough. You have to oppose the thinking underneath it.

The idea that Black is racial, white is neutral. That a district drawn to include Black voters is an intervention, but a district that has always excluded them is just the way things are. That whiteness is the default and everything else is the deviation.

That thinking did not start with Samuel Alito. It lives in people who would never vote for him.

It is the DNA of America. And until we reckon with it as a society, we will return here again and again.

The Reconstruction era showed us what was possible. Black men in Congress. Black institutions. Black political power. Twelve years. And then white Americans took it away.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the start of a better democracy. Hard won. Paid for in blood. And again, six justices in robes took that away.

They always take it away.

Until we as a society don’t let them.

That is white supremacy in a robe.

And you cannot fight white supremacy while accepting its premise.

I knew John Lewis. He was my congressman for over a decade. I sat with him when I was 27 and listened to what it cost to cross that bridge. He was there with hundreds of young Black people marching from Selma to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. Alabama State troopers who wanted to enforce and maintain white supremacy fractured his skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

This is my parents’ generation.

Not ancient history.

People died for the right to vote in this country.

Yesterday six justices decided that was not enough. That the remedy for racism is itself racist. That the cure is the disease. That the people who bled for this law were the problem all along.

If you are angry today, good. Stay angry.

But then go further. Challenge the premise. Not just the ruling. Challenge the whole frame.

Because supremacy does not survive on the backs of its believers alone. It survives because people who know better keep using its framework, keep accepting its definitions, keep calling whiteness neutral and everything else an intervention.

The Taney Court gave us Dred Scott. A stain on America that we never fully washed out.

The Roberts Court is writing its own shameful chapter.

But I still believe in the people. Not the institutions. The people. The ones who are paying attention. The ones who know we deserve better. We deserve a country that works for all of its people. Not just a few. Not just the powerful. All of us.

History is watching.

And it never forgets.