For Adam Serwer and many fellow progressives, the answer to past racial discrimination is always future racial discrimination.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the sky-is-falling media narrative that has emerged in response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, and we cover more media misses.
To End Racial Discrimination, Keep Discriminating Based on Race
The Supreme Court recently struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. Under the ruling, race can still be considered when drawing congressional maps to ensure no illegal discrimination is taking place, but race cannot be used as the determinative factor in drawing districts.
Left-wing commentators have, predictably, inverted the logic behind the ruling, insisting that in coming out against racialized gerrymandering, the Court was actually working to enshrine racial discrimination.
Adam Serwer responded to the decision in The Atlantic by claiming, “Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now.”
The Court is now making possible “a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white,” he argues.
The case at hand centers on the creation of discriminatory race-based districts in Louisiana. The legal back-and-forth began when Louisiana Republicans redrew the state’s map after the 2020 census made one majority-black district out of the state’s six districts; Black people make up about one-third of Louisiana’s population. In 2022, a group of black voters sued the state, citing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A federal judge ordered the state to create a new map better representing its black population. The new map was drawn with a second majority black district.
But then another lawsuit argued the second district violated the 14th Amendment by unlawfully sorting voters by race. A panel of three judges sided with the plaintiffs and blocked the map from being used in the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that state lawmakers did in fact violate the Constitution by redrawing the map in order to add an additional majority-black congressional district.
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
Under the ruling, the Voting Rights Act still prohibits lawmakers from drawing districts in order to disempower a particular racial group. But, according to Serwer and other like-minded progressives, the ruling merely takes away the ability of racial minorities to correct what is a system of de facto racial discrimination. As is so often the case, their answer to past racial discrimination is future racial discrimination.
“This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called ‘reactionary colorblindness,’ the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means,” Serwer writes. “It takes the view that the Constitution’s ‘color-blindness’ renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.”
“Discriminating against Black voters is okay because they vote for Democrats,” reads Sewer’s gross mischaracterization of the ruling.
The New York Times, meanwhile, published a news article that reads more like an opinion column. “Voting Rights Ruling Could Fuel Era of Endless Redistricting Wars,” political reporter Nick Corasaniti writes.
“Probable casualties” of the decision, Corasaniti writes, include “longstanding principles of fair representation — along with American voters, who are likelier now to be shunted into hyperpartisan districts drawn in each state to benefit the party in power. A great carving could effectively dilute the power of millions, especially minority voters, and make partisan primaries more important than general elections when it comes to choosing leaders.”
The piece includes a comment from the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Alanah Odoms, who warns: “We lost one of the last seatbelts of our democracy.”
It also shares a hyperbolic statement from Damon Hewitt, the president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: “Black Americans have never been fully represented in the electoral process. This ruling makes it less likely that we ever will.”
And that wasn’t even the only doomsday reporting from the Times on the ruling. Atlanta bureau chief Rick Rojas reported on “How the Voting Rights Decision May Block the Rise of Young Black Leaders.”
On PBS Newshour, co-anchor Amna Nawaz told viewers how the decision “weakens key protections” under the 1965 Voting Rights Act and could “lead to the elimination of Black and Latino majority districts nationwide.” The program welcomed guests, including NAACP Legal Defense Fund president and director-counsel Janai Nelson, who accused the Court of “trampling on the right to vote.”
But, of course, the most alarmist tone could be found on MS NOW, which unsurprisingly invited Stacey Abrams on the show to opine about Republicans, in her words, “trying to legalize the restoration of Jim Crow.”
“That’s what’s happening here, because our power was working. We had laws across this country that allowed black and brown citizens to be fully realized as members of this society,” argues Abrams, who has become a Democratic star despite having lost two separate bids to serve as the governor of Georgia.
“The racist, fascist, leadership that starts in the White House but extends to the Supreme Court, members of Congress, and to the state and local level, they’re angry” about the country being on track to a “multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational, pluralistic democracy.”
“We cannot take as a fait accompli that they have won simply because the Supreme Court said it,” she adds. “Because the same Supreme Court, different composition, same ethos did Dred Scott,” she said, referring to the Court’s decision that found a black person was not a person under the Constitution and had no rights.
Legal analyst and law professor Paul Butler offered a similar take on MS NOW over the weekend: “It’s like the Dred Scott decision, where the Court said that the black man has no rights that the white man is bound to respect. The Supreme Court is saying that the black voter and the brown voter has [sic] no rights that it respects.”
It’s just the latest example of liberal commentators suggesting the Court’s conservative majority, which includes Justice Clarence Thomas, would take away the rights of black Americans.
Headline Fail of the Week
After a shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner made clear he was targeting President Trump and Trump administration officials, Politico still apparently needed to blame Republicans for something. “After WHCD shooting, Republicans blame Dems for political rhetoric,” a headline from the outlet reads.
Worse yet, a subheading adds: “Republicans are returning to a playbook they leaned on in the aftermath of the assassination attempts against Donald Trump in 2024.” The article goes on to claim that Republicans “rushed to turn the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner into a campaign cudgel, accusing Democrats of opening the door to political violence with ‘dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric’ against the president.”
Cole Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner attack, is solely responsible for his actions. But perhaps after three assassination attempts against the president, it shouldn’t be considered newsworthy that Republicans are looking to their political opponents to turn down the rhetorical temperature.
Media Misses
- MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart turned attention away from political violence during a discussion about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on PBS Newshour last week, instead claiming the larger problem is gun violence.“The bigger issue here is gun violence, that is why I was not surprised that this had happened,” he claimed. “And I have been to that dinner at least a dozen times since 2000. And so, yes, there’s an issue of, you know, people feeling that political violence is the way to go and that we are in a highly charged atmosphere. But what’s been, sort of, a specter over all of us for even longer is the scourge of gun violence.”
- Charlamagne tha God maintained he was not justifying violence against President Trump — right before he made comments justifying violence against the president. Charlamagne initially said last week that he was “sick” of the narrative that violent rhetoric against Trump should be toned down. “I need every media personality to direct that energy and that question to one person and one person only: Donald J. Trump,” Charlamagne said on his radio program. “At what point do people simply say, ‘Hey Trump, you’re the drama?’” He doubled down one week later, when he said Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration was one reason someone could want to murder the president. His co-host Andrew Schulz asked Charlamagne if he is saying violence against Trump is justified for that reason. Charlamagne said no, but then added, “We have to deal with the reality that some of these policies have hurt people so much that some folks are willing to risk it all.”
💥NEW: Andrew Schulz *CALLS OUT* Charlamagne for “JUSTIFYING” WHCD assassination attempt on Trump💥
CHARLAMAGNE: “Some of these policies have hurt people so much that some folks are willing to risk it all.”
SCHULZ: “Well, now you’re justifying it … It’s plain and simple.” pic.twitter.com/sRBNea7SyZ
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) May 3, 2026