Their Personal Dignity Is So Important

Always read Ari Berman on voting rights. 

His latest work in Mother Jones is on redistricting and the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision. Louisiana, with a population that is one-third Black, has in recent years had two of its six Congressional districts with majority-Black populations.

Until the Callais decision. 

Once again, [Rep. Fields'] district was immediately challenged, this time by the “non-African American” voters led by Bert Callais, an election denier who attended the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Some of the insurrectionists carried Confederate flags that day—a striking symbol of their mission to overturn not just the 2020 election, but multiracial democracy writ large. Under Chief Justice Roberts, the high court used the Callais plaintiffs to accomplish this goal.

They claimed that the creation of a second majority-Black district was an affront to their “personal dignity”—an absurd argument, Fields says: “Literally, Louisiana elects more white members of Congress in one year than [Black members] we’ve elected in my whole lifetime.”

In a 6–3 decision, the court held that a majority-Black district that gave equal representation to Black people actually violated the rights of white voters under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It's important to understand how the most recent voting rights repression fits into the long history that came before. 

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John Roberts Playing the Long Game (March, 2021) 

Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot (August, 2016)