Colorblind politics have undermined civil rights for decades. Callais is just the latest.

The Voting Rights Act acknowledged what needed to happen for American democracy to flourish.

Writing for the majority in Callais v. Louisiana, Samuel Alito asserted that, “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” Election law scholar Rick Hasen had a different read on the decision, writing in Slate that, “This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation.” The gap between what the decision says it’s doing – and the logic on which it was decided – and what experts conclude will be its effects reflects a long-standing phenomenon in American politics: “colorblindness” as a driving ideology around race.

It makes sense to situate the Callais decision in terms of the legal history of the Voting Rights Act, including the long century of racial injustice that led up to it and the Roberts Court’s previous decisions weakening it. But, as Jake Grumbach points out in an astute piece about polarization, we also have to look at the political context, and the familiar, normal tropes that inform it. I’m drawing here a bit on my recent book Backlash Presidents, in which I identify colorblindness as a driving ideology that has informed norms in American politics about what can and cannot be said about race.

There’s a large academic literature (largely in political science and sociology) critiquing the concept of colorblindness. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes about the concept of “abstract liberalism,” which is the set of ideas that allow people to strip things like being opposed to busing or affirmative action from their larger racial context. On the political science side, Christopher DeSante and Candis Watts Smith explain that “colorblind ideology suggests that all groups are working on a level playing field and racial phenomena can best be explained by race-neutral factors.” They also note a shift toward norms in which discussing race is considered impolite and that social life is viewed in individual – not collective or systemic -terms. In particular, it’s probably impolite to point out that partisan redistricting plans, which are legally allowed, are potentially hard to distinguish from racial ones.

Colorblind politics uses the language of racial equality against its defenders. A central part of Ronald Reagan’s civil rights policy was his opposition to “quotas” in employment. This and similar policy commitments were defended in terms of treating everyone equally, regardless of race. The opposition to “quotas” became even more politically consequential after George Bush signed the 1991 Civil Rights Act. The events leading up to that sort of parallel what’s happened with the VRA – a 1989 Supreme Court decision maintained that discriminatory intent had to be proven in employment cases. Congress sought to change that with new legislation, which Bush somewhat reluctantly signed after vetoing an earlier version. The fact that Bush had signed a “quota bill” became part of the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan’s conservative challenge to the incumbent president in the 1992 Republican primaries.

The idea that discrimination must be overt, intentional, and proven has been the backbone of efforts to undermine the civil rights progress of the 1960s. It has been central to the rhetorical dressing of efforts to roll back not just affirmative action but also protections against employment discrimination. It has been part of Trump’s efforts to oppose DEI and to remove non-white people from positions of authority in government. It’s an animating principle of the post-Civil Rights conservative movement and has survived the resurgence of old-fashioned racism that has accompanied the rise of MAGA. What’s important about color-blind ideology, though, is that it gets at exactly the kind of principles that are hard to oppose. When politics is all about how individuals treat individuals, it’s much harder to defend using race as a criterion for most public policy decisions. This is the “abstract liberalism” that Bonilla-Silva writes about; it sits badly with most people, not just movement conservatives, to treat people differently on the basis of race. Including drawing majority-minority districts.

American political discourse is awash in this ideology, which you can see in polling data about “reverse racism” and rhetoric from all kinds of candidates (not just movement conservatives) going back to Bill Clinton’s Sister Souljah speech in 1992.

In addition to naming how the colorblind logic of the Callais decision has been normalized across the ideological spectrum, it’s also important to recognize where the Voting Rights Act came from, and what it was trying to do. Public support for the legislation came after media images of violence against peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The passage of the bill came from a successful effort to persuade the public that things really were that bad and that the system was not working for all Americans. The logic of the VRA depends on an understanding of America’s racial history, and of identifying patterns that suggest racial discrimination even in the absence of literally discriminatory laws. Literacy tests, poll taxes, moving polling places – there are lots of ways to undermine voting rights without passing laws that have any obviously racial language.

In this sense, the Voting Rights Act is a serious effort to challenge not just specific voting laws in specific locations, but a set of long-standing practices in American politics. Not long after the Civil War had ended, Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill creating a federal “freedmen’s bureau,” arguing that, “A system for the support of indigent persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution; nor can any good reason be advanced why, as a permanent establishment, it should be founded for one class or color of our people more than another.” In other words, just a few years after Emancipation, the president of the United States was posing the question of why formerly enslaved persons might be singled out for special treatment. A century of violence and discriminatory laws followed. The VRA – as originally written and then as amended in 1982 – disrupted the flow of this history by suggesting that historic and systemic damage to Black political rights and representation did call for federal involvement and for extensive corrective measures. Even though the VRA was not a Constitutional amendment, some scholars treat it as the beginning of real, multi-racial democracy in the United States.

But, as I observe in my book, these power-disrupting moments are incredibly difficult to sustain. And what we’ve seen is that there hasn’t really been a mainstream, prominent political movement devoted to countering the colorblind framework. Systemic, structural racism hardly makes for stirring campaign rhetoric, and in this sense it’s not surprising. But serious remedies to the compounding harms of the racism built in the US are not possible without a politics devoting to bolstering these remedies, and explaining why they help to realize larger equality goals.

The essential connection between race and democracy has been shown in the few days since the Callais decision was handed down. House primaries have been delayed in Louisiana following the ruling, creating confusion and buzz about “canceled elections.” A Mississippi Republican official called to “erase” Rep. Bennie Thompson’s district (Thompson is Black and the only House Democrat from Mississippi). But the stakes of the decision go far beyond the 2026 elections. The decision undermines efforts to consider history or context in making public policy to address historical power imbalances, rendering the task that much more difficult.