Tag: Supreme Court

Segregation Without Representation

.Reading time 14 minutes.
Seated from left are Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito and Elena Kagan.
Standing from left are Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

As I watch conservative state legislatures across the country trip over themselves to disassemble Black power at the ballot box, I’m reminded of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century.  At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, European colonial powers divided up the African continent for the extraction of resources, the economic and religious subjugation of people and to measure and compare their global might.[1]  Europeans never asked or considered what African people wanted or needed (independence) or whether or not they already had systems of governance and resource management in place (they did).  Europe had greed and a superiority complex backed up by the lethal violence of guns.  There was certainly never any consideration of African peoples having a say for themselves.  This was the colonial playbook.

With the recent decision by the Supreme Court to effectively nullify the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in their decision on Louisiana v Callais (2025), we are watching the colonial playbook once again and it is no less disruptive, violent, self-serving or misguided in 2026 than it was in the 1880s. [2]  In a Chief Justice Roberts fever dream about some mythical “color-blind Constitution” (thank you Justice Thomas) we are watching in real time as the highest court of the land creates a precedent for the Frankenstein resurrection of Jim Crow.[3]  It lives! What most people don’t consider about the way the Jim Crow system worked was that it wasn’t just about access, or segregation for segregation’s sake, it was about representation and civic agency.  In a REPRESENTATIVE democracy, without representation…without the ability to have one’s voice heard through the democratic process…without having a say…one is a non-citizen (disenfranchised).  This is part of the modern conservative movement chipping away at the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment (interpreting DEI as somehow harmful to white people, etc.), the re-negging on any right to non-white US citizenship, and the push for the prominence and protection of the supposed and wholly offensive concept of a “Heritage American”.[4] Welcome to the Colonial Playbook 2.0.

Segregation today is worse than it was 30 years ago and the racism that feeds it is not a thing of the past.  What is more, there is no legislation that can cure racial discrimination because racial discrimination begins with how people see themselves in relationship with others.

The conservative Justices are operating in a universe that doesn’t exist.  They seem to believe that racism is a thing of the past and that the legislative remedies that have been applied to address it are no longer necessary.  I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that they all live in white dominated segregated neighborhoods…or that they always have (Thomas excepted).  They do not understand the lived experience of Black life, other than maybe their adopted children and seeing Justice Jackson on a regular basis (Thomas excepted…though his identification with Black life might be debatable at this point).  I’m referring to Black life unshielded by wealth and white adjacency; Black life trying to exist in the glare of white suspicion, exclusion, assumption and a lack of familiarity that has been literal centuries in the making and that continues to shape every corporation, housing complex, school and institution of the United States.

Segregation today is worse than it was 30 years ago and the racism that feeds it is not a thing of the past.[5]  What is more, there is no legislation that can cure racial discrimination because racial discrimination begins with how people see themselves in relationship with others.  This is where good white liberals stumble; racism is personal and internal, not external and negotiable.  It is fear compounded by a scarcity mentality that causes people to create enclaves of exclusion to those they deem incompatible or dangerous to social cohesion. This is evident in both white exclusion and Black se-clusion because Black people don’t want to spend every waking hour doing race work whether as a defensive tactic or educating white allies.  Most Black folks would rather live in a place where they can breathe easy, regardless of economics or even personal safety.  For those of us who like to dream, we know that racism is not going away without a more drastic moral and ethical intervention that will require overturning and rethinking a half millennium of Euro-centric education, global hate-based “science”, philosophy and indoctrination.  That project is beyond the severely underequipped scope of the US government.

But even with limitations, smart and objective leaders and scholars in the not so distant past, have recognized the need to work with human weakness.  This is why legislation had attempted, through the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to create the systemic guardrails so that people’s underlying personal attitudes and misconceptions about one another could no longer be codified as harmful and dehumanizing policy. The goal was not to end racism.  The goal was to arrive at a place where even with racism alive and well, all people had a chance to be recognized as full participants and as whole people with a voice; the prevention of a weaponized government. [6],[7]  It is worth quoting Justice Kagan’s dissent at length to describe the mechanics of what has now happened as a stark contrast to the spirit of 1965:

Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district in a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a rectangular State.  The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White.  And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans.  The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last.  The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted. That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form.  A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—“cracked” is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence.[8] (emphasis mine)

We are at the dawn of a renewed period of segregation without representation.  Black congressional districts will now be sliced and diced and “scrambled” for so that “color-blind” white majority politicians can say “see, we’re not racist…we have Black people in our district!”  But unlike Africa in the 19th century, the resource conservative politicians are seeking is not gold or human labor; it is Black civic power and agency.  They will extract it behind a performative mask of equality, diversity and fairness…only to bury it alive in a redistricted unmarked grave.

As long as the racist system can claim that it has at least one Black friend, or adopted child or neighbor, it can claim to be race neutral.  It never has to talk about the white hood hanging in the back of its mind, or its closet.  It also never has to get closer than it is comfortable with to consider the real lived human experience of the Black “other”.  According to this myth, race can remain a hypothetical, theoretical consideration and not something that is lived in silence and exclusion.

Despite Project 2025, despite the Bad-Built-Billionaire-Bought-Body of the Republican Congress and despite an Executive Cabinet that looks like a Fox News casting call, we cannot be distracted by trivialities.  This is not good enough.  While none of us might live to see the day, we still must invest in the long game of ending racism and racialization.  This will not happen by blithely declaring that “race doesn’t exist”, but by intentionally recognizing the ways in which race is real, and providing unbendable guardrails on the path toward tearing it down (like the East Wing of the White House, except this demolition will have a useful purpose.)  To do this requires knowing all of race’s contours and hidden traits and histories and thoroughly understanding how race works as a structure attached to, around and inside of all of us.

The edifice we call the United States was built entirely on an 18th century foundation of European-derived racial stones.  It was then clad with shingles of male-centered sexism and topped with a roof of religious exceptionalism and filled with the spoils of slave-based capitalism and war.  It is an unsound structure in its current states, and it does not serve all of “we the people”.  The first step to demolishing this thing to make way for something better suited to an evolved and ever-evolving democracy is to clear away everything that keeps the old, dangerous structure standing.  If the six radical conservative Supreme Court Justices are the load bearing walls…then let theirs be the first bricks to go.  This property is condemned.

–ALD

[1] “The Berlin Conference,” Https://Www.Oerproject.Com/, accessed May 9, 2026.

[2] “Louisiana v. Callais (Voting Rights Act) (24-109),” accessed May 9, 2026.

[3] “Louisiana v. Callais (Voting Rights Act) (24-109).”

[4] “Are You a ‘Heritage American’? The Online Right Would Like to Know. – POLITICO,” accessed May 9, 2026.

[5] “Home | Othering & Belonging Institute,” accessed May 9, 2026.

[6] George Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address as governor is exemplary of the racial tone of a place like Alabama at the time.  “Inaugural Address of Governor George Wallace, Which Was Delivered at the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. – Alabama Textual Materials Collection – Alabama Department of Archives and History,” accessed May 9, 2026.

[7] “Voting Rights Act (1965),” National Archives, October 6, 2021.

[8] “Louisiana v. Callais (Voting Rights Act) (24-109).”

Sacred Choices

.Reading time 8 minutes.

“You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time, and that’s why this is so challenging, I think.”[1] – Justice Brett Kavanaugh during opening arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Dec. 1, 2021

Where is the voice of liberal religion in the spiritual debate about abortion?  Is liberal religion only concerned with the secular question of personal liberty and autonomy?  For liberal religion, does reason vacate any sense of the divine?

The insistence by some people to have a secular argument about something that is a uniquely spiritual question for others is always problematic.  The primary basis for the anti-abortion argument is the religiously motivated question of when life begins.  Either there is life, or there is no life.  This is what sits subtly behind Kavanaugh’s statement.  The definition of “life” may be scientific, but the impulse to raise the question is, for most religious conservatives, deeply spiritual.

Liberal religion has the potential to be a powerful spiritual language in this conversation and would do well to reclaim some of its power of persuasion at the table.  Liberal religion is woefully thin when it boils itself down to reason only; indeed, when it does so, it stops being religion altogether and becomes politics.  What is most useful about liberal religion as it has evolved in today’s world is its capacity to hold complexity.  Within these spaces and communities and theologies, there is not just the space for reason but also the ability to fully embrace divergent religious belief, diverse embodied experience and conflicting political agendas.

These are ethically expansive spaces where humanity in all of its variation is held at the center.  As a result, liberal religion calls us to a deeply nuanced understanding of what it means to create life.  It asks us to think about the fact that people who are able to become pregnant hold incredible responsibility.  But more than responsibility, they hold immense power that informs us all what it means to be alive.  Within their bodies is not only the ability to bring life into existence (for no fetus ever willed itself into being) but also, the ability to end that life, either by naturally occurring or artificial means.  It is this dual potential for life and death that becomes an embodied expression of human wholeness.

Indeed, birth does not come without death.  We “learn” death from the fact that we are born.  Once you are born…even once a being is conceived, it is capable of death…and the death of the body is inevitable.  This is at the heart of human being…even in the most God-centered religious beliefs.  The ability to create life from within the body (whether you believe it comes from God or science or both) does not come without the inevitability of the end life.  This is the awesome power of one of the most important theologies of womanhood* that is so often missed in a male-dominated phallocentric society.

The pro-choice movement is not doing itself any favors by totally secularizing the argument.  Our embodiment is not exclusively political or governmental.  It can’t be.  Embodiment is emotional, sensual, ethical, individual, communal and by extension for some, spiritual and profoundly religious.  As I look at it, the pro-choice movement actually has a much stronger spiritual argument than the anti-abortion movement because it can embrace the fullness of the spiritual mandate that is embodied in the potential to create mortal life.  In fact, the pro-choice movement is more pro-life than the pro-lifers. Women and people who give birth are the only ones who introduce every single human to the fragile balance between life and death that we call “being.”  Denying them the totality of that power, responsibility and the divine genetic script because of politics or narrow enforcement of human imposed orthodoxies is a violation of their total humanity.

People who believe that the spirit animates us from conception and who insist that intentionally ending pregnancy is a crime (against God), are not wrong.  But they must remember that their definition of life that is based on their religious view of the world is not shared by everyone.  Nor can it be, nor should it be.  Alternately, people who do not adhere to a religious framework and who insist that the right to one’s body is an inalienable right that can never be infringed upon in a secular society are also not wrong.  But they must remember that we co-exist with the kaleidoscope of ways in which each of us (sometimes individually and sometimes in community) make sense of knowing we are alive while also knowing that we will die.  This is knowledge that is most often answered in our world by religion.  Liberal religious perspectives provide language and frameworks to carry both.

I will pray that the current debate about a woman’s right to choose the arc of pregnancy is decided in such a way that embodied, spiritual or human rights are held with greatest care.  From a liberal religious perspective, I believe it is possible.  Despite what Justice Kavanaugh and other conservatives on the court say, it is not a choice of one or the other, but really must be a “both, and.”  Sadly, the courts have never done “both, and” well (think Plessy v. Ferguson.)

One thing is for sure, although all of us know we will die, none of us knows that we will be born.  That is a sacred, exclusive conversation held between God and/or being and those who are blessed with the bodies in which we are conceived. No court or law required.

–ALD

[1] Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, p. 106.

* Here I am referencing womanhood that is not defined by birth or assigned gender…rather womanhood that can contain both.