On Wednesday (04/28), the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling on Louisiana v. Callais, effectively outlawing race-based redistricting practices. The decision, directly invalidating a second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana, considerably limits the scope of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by restricting states’ use of race as a factor in drawing congressional maps.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion, argues: “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” Justice Alito’s opinion echoes Chief Justice John Roberts in the court’s 2023 ruling on SFFA v. Harvard: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” This decisive interpretation of the Constitution and case law validates the letter and spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Unsurprisingly, proponents of race-based government action are smearing the decision as a major blow to civil rights, racial justice and minority representation. Such inflammatory reasoning can only be true if we as a nation hold on to the debunked notion that Americans of different racial backgrounds are best represented by elected officials who look like them. This essentially racial-pairing argument is similar to the pervasive “rationale” in education policy-making that students of certain demographics should be taught by teachers who look them. Different areas of focus, same tactic of racial segregation.

We believe that America, as naturally diverse as it has been since its founding, has long traveled past the point of having to use group-based, positive, affirmative action to remedy historical wrongs. As Justice Alito wrote in the ruling, “Although any use of race in government decision-making generally triggers strict scrutiny, in gerrymandering cases a challenger must show that race was the government’s predominant consideration.”

In fact, Wednesday’s landmark ruling comports with the guiding principle of non-discrimination behind the Fifteenth Amendment, that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It reassures America’s cardinal principle of equality, which is, albeit once temporarily tagged to group representation, fundamentally and unambiguously about the equal rights of all Americans, from educational access to political participation, on the basis of the individual.

Once again, the nation’s highest court interprets the law in faithful observation of our constitutional guarantee of equal protection, a cause that CFER has dedicated to in the last six years. We applaud this step and pledge to keep up our work in the same direction.