Tennessee Sen. Charlane Oliver, unfurled a large sign during debate on a redistricting plan to divide the majority black Memphis into separate districts. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
Democrats keep telling us that Jim Crow is a ghost of the past, but the Supreme Court's latest ruling proves otherwise.
“Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” - Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
The current Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has left no doubt about its approach to representative democracy in the United States. Last month, in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, the high court ruled that a second, majority Black congressional district drawn in Louisiana in 2024 was unconstitutional and relied too heavily on race as part of its composition. The state, where Black people account for approximately 33% of its population, will now contain only one majority Black congressional district. The overarching decision vastly weakens the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) and updates the legal test for determining if Section 2, which prohibits voting discrimination on the basis of race, of the act has been violated. In short, SCOTUS raised the bar and massively increased the burden of proof by now requiring challengers of racially-gerrymandered maps, which can essentially be described as, “Cracking splits groups of disfavored voters among multiple districts,” to show a strong inference that racial discrimination, rather than partisan politics, motivated any changes to a state’s congressional and other legislative maps.
The decision in Louisiana v. Callais has already resulted in swift and prompt redistricting/gerrymandering actions at the State level, which will certainly have major implications for the forthcoming Midterm elections. Tennessee was the first state to strike with its State Legislature returning to Nashville for a special session to redraw its congressional maps before the ink of the SCOTUS decision was even dry. The new map eviscerates the only congressional district held by the Democrats and further carves Tennessee’s, now previously, majority-Black congressional seat into three districts - a profound machination of divide and conquer. Other southern states are poised to follow suit with Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida each indicating their intent to execute or explore drawing new maps.
The impacts of Louisiana v. Callais are already being felt both electorally and emotionally as Black folk who fought for the VRA, many who know some who were beaten and killed for it, are witnessing younger people in their families and communities with less freedoms and rights than themselves - this is especially true for young Black women whose ability to vote for their choice representatives and their choice to make medical decisions regarding their bodies have both been deracinated in less than a decade. Yet it's the response(s) to the recent SCOTUS decision, that will potentially cost 19 Congressional Black Caucus, or nearly one third, members their seats, that has been puzzling.
While appearing on MSNOW host Ali Velshi’s program, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries proclaimed that the recent SCOTUS decision is, “throwing the American south back into the Jim Crow era.” And South Carolina Democratic Congressman, Jim Clyburn indicated, while speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper, that the SCOTUS decision is reminiscent of the protections that were removed in the South that essentially ended the Reconstruction Era that ushered in the epoch of Jim Crow. And numerous news outlets have evoked the return to Jim Crow narrative including journalist Ari Berman who recently wrote a piece for Mother Jones entitled, After SCOTUS Destroyed the Voting Rights Act, Southern States Rush to Pass Jim Crow Voting Maps, that included a quote from Martin Luther King III who pleaded to Tennessee State lawmakers, “Do not take this nation back to the days of Jim Crow.”
These reactions are interesting and ironic. Interesting in that these reactionary lawmakers, journalists, and civil rights “leaders” seem to believe that Jim Crow disappeared or was somehow defeated sometime between passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Ironic in that the belief that Jim Crow was gone is as feckless as some of the reasoning contained in Justice Alito’s majority opinion in which he stated, “First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” This is a curious observation by Justice Alito, but unfortunately the statistics don’t support it. Just last year, the Economic Policy Institute released a report entitled, The ongoing influence of slavery and Jim Crow means high poverty rates and low economic mobility in the South. The report includes five key findings that refute Alito’s claims and further elucidates his profound and abject juris-INprudence:
- Poverty rates across the South (12.4% in 2023) have been consistently higher than other regions (11% in the West and 9.8% in both the Northeast and Midwest);
- Today, the Southern states in which slavery was most prevalent and where policymakers embraced the Southern economic development model have poverty rates above the national median, with the highest rates in Louisiana (18.9%) and Mississippi (18%);
- Women (13.9%) have a higher poverty rate than men (10.4%), especially white men (8.3%). Hispanic (17.7%), AIAN (19.3%), and Black (19.9%) women have the highest poverty rates, with almost one-fifth falling below the poverty line;
- At 18%, the South has the highest child poverty rate of all regions. Black children across the region have the highest poverty rate at 30.1%—almost three times the poverty rate for white children—followed by AIAN (24.4%) and Hispanic (24%) children; and
- Southern states have consistently shown lower levels of intergenerational mobility than other regions.
The report concludes, “As we saw with high rates of persistent poverty in the South, there is a close association between the history of extreme racial subordination, slavery, and economic mobility for those living in these communities to this day.” All to say that Jim Crow never went away, like the Dark Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series Jim has been buying time, building power, and outflanking and outorganizing the neoliberal Democrat Party while also proving, time and time again, that it is not a proper opposition party - certainly not for the moment we find ourselves in. Jim Crow, like Voldemort, has been more of a phantom menace than ever disappearing (rest assured more Star Wars references will follow in this piece).
Defeating and vanquishing Jim Crow once and for all will first require an understanding of what he/it is. Jim Crow has a double and multifaceted existence. He/it exist(s) as a system while contemporaneously existing as people who were produced by the system - people who will do anything and everything to uphold that system, and that system is white “supremacy,” which is nourished by the program that allows the system to flourish- insidiously and ubiquitously, sinister and sustainable, intransigent yet adaptable, rigid and malleable - racial capitalism. Further, as Black Alliance for Peace founder Ajamu Barka explains, “Jim Crow is in essence the persistence of internal colonialism, that along with the super-exploitation of Black workers represents the specific and unique characteristics of the struggles by Africans in the settler colonial project called the U.S.” There has never been enough discussion about who/what Jim Crow really is, and this has resulted in losses of elections, opportunities, and lives, further vindicating the sage words of Sun Tzu who, in the Art of War, reminds us, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Unfortunately, and to its detriment, the U.S. “left” and its “progressive” institutions and non profit organizations don’t like to talk about white “supremacy” or internal/domestic colonialism - perhaps because these conversations would elucidate the myriad ways they uphold it, which is contrary to their whitewashed version of prefigurative politics. And the same utopia myopia included in Alito’s decision is alive and well in these "left” and "progressive" spaces, which acts as a suppressant to the requisite discussions and collective struggles necessary to send Jim Crow to the gallows. It’s the same thinking observed in the Harry Potter series, as if not saying the Dark Lord’s name somehow prevented him from regaining his power and killing a lot of wizards when he achieved full strength. Too many Democrats do the same when they proudly proclaim that “America” is not a racist country.
Take former Vice President, Kamala Harris, for instance who agreed with GOP Senator Tim “Crow” Scott that America is not a racist country while appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America. She then proceeded to contradict herself by saying, “But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.” How does that make any sense - if racism exists in “America” today and it has a racist history, did this history just suddenly end in a way that ushered in a post racial “America?” Hakeem Jeffries, who while decrying the recent SCOTUS decision also claimed that it was a threat to the “progress” made in the nation was just told to keep his “cotton picking” hands off of Virginia politics by a sitting GOP member of Congress on a radio program. Far too many members of the Democrat party have failed to see that the racism and white “supremacy” that fuel Jim Crow hasn’t been diluted, they’ve become more pronounced over years of moving from covert to overt machinations much like Voldemort did under the nose of the Ministry of Magic. Gone are the days of the Lee Atwater approach to utilizing de facto rather than de jure racism and white “supremacy” to advance the Southern Strategy - Jim Crow no longer has to operate in the shadows, he/it can now operate boisterously and in an even more sadistic fashion in how it exercises iniquity - this most demonstrated in the recent SCOTUS decision, which did not take away the vote, it told oppressed people you can still vote…for whomever we choose to allow you to vote for.
We may very well need some magic to overcome a dark force like Jim Crow, and the Democrats are not fit for this task. While they are masters of illusion, they are not wizards of opposition - preserving the Union is more central to their goals than advancing liberation from what makes the union perpetually imperfect. We hear from many Democrats and left-leaning “progressives” of the need for a Third Reconstruction. There can’t be a so-called Third Reconstruction without there first being a first and final deconstruction of the entire U.S. polity in its current state. This deconstruction must include the evisceration of Democrat party-aligned neoliberal think tanks and capitulating non profits/civil society organizations who still believe that a broken system can be fixed or tinkered with to deliver collective liberation. The system is bad, the system that purports to fight the system is even worse because it upholds the lie that is “America” while lying to themselves and the masses - a sadistic case of double duplicity.
Quiescence and capitulation is not the spell we need right now; it won’t work and hasn’t been working. Rather than mustering a proper opposition the Democrats beguile the masses with messages of “hope.” But hope has become a form of life support instead of the lifeblood of the U.S. “left,” a form of CPR for it and and its “movement” spaces to the point where I wonder if it should be resuscitated or left to die so that something more powerful can come to life - Obi Wan understood this the last time he fought Darth Vader and through his death Luke Skywalker was put in a better position to destroy the first Death Star (with some help from a smuggler and a Wookiee of course). Jim Crow and the Right, like Voldemort, understood the need to let things die in order to better live far better than the “left” ever has. For instance in 2008 when the GOP was trounced in federal elections, it shifted its focus to a bottom-up local and State level strategy while the Democrats allowed their rhapsody from electing the first Black president to completely blind them from what was happening. During Obama’s presidency the Democrats lost nearly 1,000 State-level seats resulting in the GOP controlling 33 of 49 state houses and 35 of 49 state senates by the end of 2014. The GOP then used their power from seizing states to seize the federal government with its SCOTUS acting as vanguards that we will have to contend with for at least the next 20-30 years. And, as a result, states have gone from being “laboratories of democracy” to conveyor belts of oppression and subjugation.
We must exercise a paradoxical equation and learn from the GOP and the Right. In the process, we must ask ourselves why the Democrats and their adjacent think tanks and non profits/civil society organizations, as well as the capitalist philanthropists that bankroll them, possess such an aversion to establishing and maintaining a robust local and State-level strategy. At the end of the day it doesn’t take magic as much as the will to do what is necessary to win. Harry Potter possessed the ability to utilize magic in his favor, but it was his indomitable will that carried him through the day at the end of it. The Democrats have neither the magic nor the will, which is what it’s time for the masses to start learning new spells while spelling out an entirely different approach to politics - one that is truly independent and truly oppositional to the tyranny of racial capitalism. It starts by identifying the enemy and the system that gives the enemy its power as opposed to denying what is right in front of us, something the Democrats are unwilling and incapable of, which suggests that it’s time for us to collectively say. “Abra Cadabra” and make that party disappear along with Jim Crow.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cats, “Evil” Ernie and MalaChai the Mischievous. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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