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The Supreme Court’s recent Voting Rights Act decision did not take away the right to vote from a single Black citizen. What it did was begin to roll back a system that allowed politicians and activists to carve Black voters into bizarre racial districts and call it justice.
For years, I have watched congressional maps become more and more absurd. They twisted down highways, jumped across rivers, and reached through paper-thin corridors just to reach yet another cluster of Black voters. These politicians were not drawing neighborhoods connected by proximity, common issues or shared interests — they were drawing by race. They would take a Black neighborhood here and then, miles away, figure out how to connect it to another Black neighborhood with a narrow strip of land so they could hit the right percentage.
That always bothered me. The same people who claim to speak for equality were perfectly willing to reduce Black citizens to pieces on a map. They did not see families, churches, schools or local communities. They saw census blocks and skin color. They called that representation. I always saw something more twisted in it. It said that Black people could not stand politically on their own. It said we had to be specially arranged, specially packaged and specially protected by a racial bureaucracy in order to matter.
Now the Supreme Court has said no to much of this. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court sharply changed the way Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be used in redistricting and limited the race-based logic that had shaped many of these maps. It did not repeal the Voting Rights Act. It did not take away anyone’s ballot. It did not say Black Americans cannot vote, cannot run, cannot organize or cannot win. It said government cannot keep making race the overriding principle in drawing districts and pretend that this is the highest form of civil rights.
SUPREME COURT JUST GAVE BLACK VOTERS A SHOT AT REAL POWER BEYOND SAFE SEATS
You would never know that from the reaction on the left. Within days, the usual commentators were acting like this was 1955 in the Deep South. They said the Voting Rights Act had been gutted and demolished. It was like all of a sudden, we had gone back to literacy tests, poll taxes and clubs on the head for trying to register.
What makes it worse is that some of the usual race charlatans have seized on this as an opportunity. They are a whole class of racial performance artists who know exactly what they are doing. They take any ruling they dislike and immediately dress it up in the language of White supremacy, segregation and historical terror. Some of them throw around the term “White supremacy” so casually that the words themselves begin to lose all meaning. That is not serious thought.
They are exploiting the old ghosts of racism to build their own brand. They are profiteering from fear. That is immoral.
HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA BECAME ‘PART OF THE RACE GRIEVANCE INDUSTRY’ HARMING BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS
What angers me most is that these Black opportunists and these White-guilt liberals refuse to let us have this moment for what it is: a step toward fuller equality under the law. For once, the country is moving away from a system that says Black political power must depend on special racial sorting by the government. Instead of recognizing that as progress, they have to spit all over it. They have to stir up the long-dead ghost of systemic racism and scare people into believing that America is still so hopelessly racist that Black citizens cannot possibly stand under the same rules as everyone else.
That is disgusting.
But these charlatans are not protecting us. They are protecting their own importance. If Black people begin to see this as a move toward one standard of citizenship, where our vote matters because we are citizens and not because we were packed into a specially shaped district, then the entire grievance industry starts to lose its hold. So, they panic. They scream “White supremacy.” They scream “Jim Crow.” They tell us democracy is dying. What they are really fighting for is to stave off their declining relevance.
IT TAKES DISCIPLINE TO RESIST THE TEMPTATION OF IDENTITY POLITICS AND LEAN INTO CHARACTER. BUT IT’S WORTH IT
There used to be real weight to the word “Black” in this country. It meant pride. It meant a people who had endured humiliation and still stood up straight. It meant perseverance, self-respect, faith and overcoming. It meant mothers and fathers teaching their children to work hard, keep the faith and never surrender their dignity. But too many of today’s loudest voices speaking in the name of Black America are little more than hustlers. They shuck and jive for cameras, call America irredeemably racist, and do it all in a country that gives them the freedom to sell that lie.
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That is the tragedy. Instead of saying, “Go out and win over your neighbors,” they say, “You cannot survive unless someone packages you by race.” Instead of seeing us as builders, they keep casting us as permanent victims.
As a pastor, I reject that story. Our dignity comes from God. Our political power comes from organizing, persuading, showing up and building coalitions with the people who share our streets and values, not just our skin color. I want Black people to believe in that kind of power. Not the power of grievance merchants. Not the power of race hustlers. Real power.
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We need faith in our own agency, confidence in our own voice, and the courage to stand under the same law as everyone else.
We are Americans. That is not racism. That is progress.
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