On April 29, the Supreme Court ransacked the Voting Rights Act, which was won by the Civil Rights Movement decades ago. In a 6-3 ruling, it undermined the section which outlaws voter discrimination on the basis of race.
The ruling by the six conservative judges has made it essentially impossible to prove that electoral maps are racially discriminatory. This ruling is added to a decade of Supreme Court decisions that have chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, they ruled that federal oversight into racial discrimination in certain states was no longer necessary. In 2018, and again in 2021, they further weakened the ability to prove that voting districts were drawn on a racial basis. Meanwhile, a 2019 Supreme Court decision to protect partisan gerrymandering—the redrawing of voting districts to benefit a political party—makes it easier to skew districts to “protect the party”.
These decisions reestablish the stripping of voting rights from millions of people. Communities with a concentration of Black people or immigrants will not have a say when it comes to selecting their representatives. Their numbers will be dispersed and overridden by mainly white populations that surround them. This will allow politicians to more openly deepen the racial and ethnic biases used to divide us.
This divide-and-conquer strategy has always existed. But it was weakened through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The systematic exclusion of Black people from the political process was no longer possible. The Movement exposed the hypocrisy of a system that claimed to be democratic. The denial of access to basic rights and social services would no longer be tolerated.
A generation of young people, from all sections of the population, was activated by the possibilities opened by these movements in the South. The ruling class was forced to make changes. And their government responded with the Civil Rights Act (1964), followed by the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968).
These laws supposedly enforced rights that were guaranteed by the Constitution. The Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination in voting as a way to enforce the right to vote and select representatives. This resulted in the election of an increasingly diverse range of people elected to local and national offices. For the most part, they became absorbed into the political parties that defend the basic interests of the banks and the big corporations, but for many they represented a hope for change. But over the years, for increasing numbers of people, that change has not been realized.
The failure of this system to focus on the needs of the majority of the population—the working class—didn’t begin with the election of Trump. The increasing levels of poverty, the collapse of industrial cities, the increase in incarceration, the dismantling of education and healthcare, and other attacks have been ongoing.
The Trump administration isn’t hiding its goal of dividing the population along racial and ethnic lines. It is threatening voting rights by attempting to eliminate mail-in ballots, demanding proof of citizenship at the polls, and threatening to station ICE agents at the polls—obstacles that bring back memories of the segregated South.
We cannot surrender any of our rights. But the rights we have won were not given by this system. The rights we deserve won’t be given either.
Their divide-and-conquer attempts can be opposed. They expected people who were not targeted by the terror of ICE to stand back and let these attacks go on. But across the country this was not the case. People in small towns and large cities mobilized to oppose ICE terror and in some places, like Minneapolis, they were forced to withdraw. Still, detention centers continue to be built and innocent people are arrested, beaten, murdered, and sent out of the country.
But the fight continues. Over the past months we have seen hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of people in the streets demanding an end to the attacks on our lives and an end to wars on people around the world. This May Day, millions of people celebrated International Workers’ Day in demonstrations across the U.S and around the globe. People are increasingly aware of the need for change.
We can refuse to allow our lives and the lives of future generations to be destroyed. Every attack on our rights tries to push us backwards, but we also can’t rely on voting to change our situation fundamentally. The gains of the Civil Rights movement were made by people, like ourselves, refusing to accept the attacks of those in power. It’s our time to do the same.
Our power is not through their court system or their elections, it will be on through our own struggles. We don’t have to wait on anyone to point the way.
We are the ones we have been waiting for!
