After Callais, There Is an Ache
The Roberts Court didn't instruct states to disenfranchise Black voters, but it had to know that's what would happen.
By Shalise Manza Young
Since April 29, when Chief Justice John Roberts was able, at long last, to complete the goal he’s pursued his entire adult life — killing the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act — there’s been an ache.
And a fury.
And a pull, however fleeting, to fold.
And a renewed call to fight.
It is heavy. It is exhausting. It is heartbreaking to realize yet again that there has never been one day, not one single day, where many of the white men in power have accepted that foundational Black Americans are entitled to equal citizenship and equal rights in the country their ancestors built, not just without any pay but under constant threat of and actual violence.
To realize that true democracy was ushered in and kicked out in my mother’s lifetime. When she was 15, Black people like her finally were granted the right to vote (she grew up in Massachusetts and, despite the good things the state did around the abolitionist movement, it did not fully enfranchise Black women until passage of the VRA), and now at 76 saw six members of the Supreme Court declare that, for all intents and purposes, especially now as a Florida resident, she no longer has those rights.
To look at your brilliant, beautiful Black children and realize that in many corners they are still hated simply because of the luminous shades of their skin, their intelligence is discounted, and their achievements are invalidated centuries after one of their great-grandfathers earned his freedom by fighting in the Revolutionary War and another fought with the Union for other Black people to enjoy the freedom he was fortunate enough to have been born with.
To know that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the daughter and granddaughter of people who had endured the Jim Crow South, one of the most accomplished Supreme Court nominees in the body’s history, who has been maligned as a “DEI hire” by some of the very same people who affirmed a comically unqualified, Fox-News-weekend-show-hosting, accused sexual assaulter and all-around terrible human to become Defense secretary, was essentially powerless as Roberts and his five co-conspirators green-lighted a new era of suppression: the John Crow era.
There is an ache.
To watch an incredibly bad-faith actor like rude and condescending CNN pundit Scott Jennings, look in the face of a Black woman and rationalize that since the people of Memphis, Tennessee, a city that is two-thirds Black, are currently represented in Congress by a white man that it doesn’t matter that the state’s neo-Confederate legislators tore their district into three to negate their votes, and then ask with a straight face, “Why is it that a Republican can’t do just as well representing Black voters?”
Setting aside the fact that no matter his race, Memphians had the opportunity to use their votes to select their representative, which Republicans, Mr. Jennings? The kind of Republican who would join the 212 House Republicans who voted no on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in 2021?
The kind of Republican who called the sitting vice president “trash,” as the sitting vice president did in 2024? The kind who calls any and every Black woman “low IQ” and calls nations across the African diaspora “shithole countries”?
Or the kind like the horrifically unqualified “I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats” secretary of Health and Human Services, who two years ago said Black children on Adderall and antidepressants, “which are known to induce violence,” should be “reparented” to a wellness farm?
Separating Black children. From their parents. To send them to a farm.
Are those the kinds of Republicans you want to see represent Black people, Mr. Jennings? Ones whose actions show they prefer that Black people “know their place” and to whom that place is always under their boot?
There is an ache.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, who did the dirty work of writing the Callais v. Louisiana decision, and the rest of the SCOTUS segregationists will cry that they had no intention of decimating Black people’s right to vote broadly, just the people who vote for Democrats who happen to be Black.
Given what we’ve seen and read from them, it’s easy to believe this court would need to be supplied with an email from plaintiffs with election officials not only celebrating the silencing of Black voices but using the full n-word before they’d consider a Section 2 violation.
Roberts didn’t explicitly instruct states to disenfranchise Black voters or question the legitimacy of Black elected officials, and the notorious 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson didn’t establish Jim Crow laws. As voting rights attorney Marc Elias pointed out, the court gave the permission structure to do those things.
Something as blatant as Mississippi state Auditor Shad White tweeting, “We’re fighting so that [Black Congressmen] Bernie Thompson and Hakeem Jeffries are not in charge. We’re fighting for the future of our country,” is not, according to Alito, an indication that the tidal wave of changes are racist.
There is an ache.
One day, perhaps, we will have history books that tell the truth of this time in the United States, of the white men whose actions were driven by a hatred of Black people. And that in those books, John Roberts’s 40-year quest to end the VRA, culminating with Callais, and the John Crow laws his decision set into motion will be mentioned on the same pages as Chief Justice Roger Taney, he of the 1857 Dred Scott decision.
Taney wrote then that not only were people of African descent not entitled to American citizenship but they are “altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
If one of you, dear readers, can explain if there is a significant difference between what Taney’s court decided in Dred Scott and what Roberts’s court decided in Callais, it would be much appreciated, because from here they fundamentally seem the same.
There is an ache. And a fury.
Shalise Manza Young is an award-winning writer focused on the intersections of race, gender, politics, and sports. She is the director of track and field at Phillips Andover Academy. She and her family, including Contrarian Pet of the Week Coco, live in Boston. You can find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.