President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Public Domain Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
To white people who believe race should have nothing to do with drawing voting districts:
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re trying to be fair.
I’ve heard you say that you want a world where race doesn’t determine anyone’s fate. I understand that. It’s not a bad thing to want. I mean, who doesn’t want all of our race problems solved?
But let’s be clear: “not seeing color” isn’t the path to that world. It never has been. It’s actually a clever way of not seeing the road we’re on. It gives us permission to act as though all the wounds have healed just because we’ve decided to stop looking at them.
But race has always been a factor in how this country draws its districts. The question never centered on whether race would shape political power, but rather whose racial interests would be served in the process.
For most of this country’s history, the answer was obvious and simple: white people’s.
After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment was supposed to guarantee Black men the right to vote. But as soon as that racial reformation became law, Southern states got to work. They divided Black communities across multiple districts so they couldn’t build a majority anywhere. The kind of folks who would eventually brainstorm the White Citizens Councils shoehorned Black people into single districts to limit their reach everywhere else.
And boy howdy, did they get creative, too! They used literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, economic intimidation, and outright violence. Race did enormous amounts of political work … just not in Black people’s favor.
Here’s the nut of the thing: The Voting Rights Act, contrary to the current howls of indignation, didn’t introduce race into the questino of redistricting. The purpose of the VRA was an attempt to correct what powerful white people had already done for years in weaponizing race to refashion the world in their image. It said: “Look, you don’t get to use race as a weapon for a hundred years to prevent Black people from consolidating power, and then declare race irrelevant the moment the people whose necks you’ve been putting your political boot on try to use the law to protect themselves against your boot.”
The reasoning doesn’t require a Ph.D. in logic. In fact, the Senate understood this so clearly that in 2006, they reauthorized the VRA 98-0. Unanimous. Then, George W. Bush signed it. Because the history was the history.
On April 29th, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 majority decided that history had become irrelevant. But that history was bought with the blood of countless Black people, whose only sin was trying to get this country to live up to its promises. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, etc....”
And within days of the Supreme Court’s decision, states across the South started redrawing maps to eliminate majority-Black districts. Tennessee wiped out its only Black-majority congressional district. Florida moved to pick up four more Republican seats. They didn’t waste any time before they started carving up the South again.
Why?
Because they’d been waiting for this moment.
Before I go any further, I need to be honest about the fact that I’ve profited from this whole setup. People who look like me have benefited, whether or not we ever realized the extent of the gift bestowed on us for no other reason than our whiteness.
We’ve benefited from a system of representation that was built, in part, on Black exclusion. The districts that looked “normal” to me growing up, the representatives who looked like me, the sense that the system was basically working fine—all of that was downstream of choices that were made using race, decisions that said white political power wasn’t merely worth protecting; it was essential to the survival of everything good and decent in the world.
Let’s cut to the chase: you and I never had to think about the issue of race in redistricting because it’s always worked for people like us. That was the beauty of the whole setup: just wind it up every so often, and it’ll do the necessary dirty work without us having to lift a finger. It was its own Rube Goldberg machine of white dominance.
So, when I hear people extolling “colorblindness” now in all the comment sections, what I hear is people trying to convince themselves that all they care about is fairness. But if they were honest with themselves about the history, they’d be forced to admit that “race” and “fairness” have almost never voluntarily dug fishing worms together. Whenever there’s been racial equity, it’s usually come wrapped in bloody bandages.
The prophets didn’t hide behind abstraction when it came to issues of justice and equity. They didn’t tell Israel to treat everybody equitably going forward and let the past take care of itself. They identified specific wounds inflicted on specific people and demanded specific repair.
Amos never said, “You know what? Let’s all just try to be fairer, okay?”
He said justice was being sold for silver and the poor were being ground into the dust, and God wasn’t in the business of looking the other way while it played out. The prophetic call to repair wasn’t vague or generic. It was ruthlessly particular.
So, we can still want a world where race doesn’t determine anyone’s political fate. Hell, we should want that. But we can’t get there by pretending our overweening race-obsessed past didn’t shape a present in which race remains largely unsolved. That’s just leaving the work for our children and calling it wisdom.
Black Americans are angry right now because this is an old betrayal in a new form. They’re familiar with the plot of this particular story. They’ve watched the law that finally gave them real tools to fight back get gutted piece by piece. Shelby County in 2013. Callais last week. Black people certainly aren’t being paranoid.
And white people, especially those of us who want to think of ourselves as decent, have to decide whether our commitment to fairness is strong enough to survive the truth. Because fairness that can only exist after the past has been erased is nothing less than self-administered amnesia. Justice can never be justice ahistorically, because the story of justice and its absence is deeply and irreducibly embedded in history.
If we want a future where race no longer determines political power, then we’ve got to be honest about the fact that race has always been about political power. We have to stop treating the repair as the real injustice and start telling the truth about why the repair was necessary in the first damn place.
Because the wound doesn’t disappear just because we pretend not to see it.
And the map doesn’t magically become fair just because the people holding the pen insist they can’t see what they’re drawing.
So, may we have the courage to tell the truth without flinching.
May we stop mistaking silence for peace.
May we dare to stand with those whose power has been carved up, packed down, thinned out, and explained away.
And may we learn, finally, that fixing the wrongs of the past is what democracy looks like when it tells itself the truth about not only who we’ve been, but who we should want to become.
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent. Click here to read the rest of his Substack .