Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘In more recent years, an increasingly ideological Supreme Court began issuing rulings that weakened the Voting Rights Act. On April 29, the court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority eviscerated much of what was left of the law, effectively saying that the legislation Americans marched, bled and died for decades ago was no longer necessary. Congressional maps that diminish the Black vote are now acceptable, according to the court, so long as state lawmakers say they are drawing them on the basis of partisan advantage and not on race.

The suggestion that partisan gerrymandering has nothing to do with race is fantastical. It ignores the defining role of race and racism in shaping partisan affiliation in the United States. For instance, the embrace of the civil rights movement by the national Democratic Party is, according to many historians, the main reason so many white Southerners became Republicans in the second part of the 20th century, a phenomenon known as realignment.

Since the court’s April ruling, largely white Republican-led legislatures across the South have moved to dismantle Black political power at stunning speed, breaking apart voting blocs at the urging of a failing president desperate to keep control of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections. The redrawing of these maps is almost certain to sharply reduce the number of Black Americans serving in the U.S. House and could critically diminish the ability of Black voters and millions of other Americans to elect candidates of their choice. At the same time, they will become less able to hold the elected officials who come to represent them accountable. Redistricting has already happened in Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama. Lawmakers plan to redistrict in Georgia and Mississippi for future elections.

The clearest assessment of this arrangement came from Ms. Chism. “Yes, I can vote, but I have no power,” she told me. She then recalled the U.S. Constitution, which for 80 years when determining congressional seats counted enslaved Black Americans as three-fifths of a person. “They’re using our body, our vote, as part of the census, like they did during slavery. They count us, but we don’t have no voice. We back to that.”…

In a moment when many things are calling for our attention, it is tempting to look away. But there are tectonic, generational shifts in power unfolding before our eyes that demand action. This is about the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans to achieve the permanent dominance of a single political party. This is about the rolling back of the clock to a time that many Americans living today do not recognize, and others fear because they do.’ (from the New York Times)