THE MAP WAR MEETS THE AUTOPSY

THE MAP WAR MEETS THE AUTOPSY: STOP TAKING BLACK VOTERS FOR GRANTED

The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision and the DNC’s 2024 autopsy belong in the same conversation: one shows how Black political power is being attacked from the outside, and the other shows how it has too often been mishandled from the inside.

In Callais, the Court held that Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district after earlier Voting Rights Act litigation, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The majority framed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a law that must enforce the Constitution, not “collide” with it, while critics warn the ruling turns a civil-rights remedy into a constitutional problem.

The Brennan Center says Congress should respond by banning partisan gerrymandering, prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, strengthening voting-rights protections, creating an enforceable right to vote, and reforming the Supreme Court. It also warns that Callais lets lawmakers use “partisan” motives as cover for maps that diminish minority political power, especially in places where race and party overlap.

That is the external threat: the mapmakers are trying to shrink Black voting power before ballots are even cast.

Now look at the internal threat. The DNC’s long-delayed autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss says Democrats underperformed with men, non-college voters, rural voters, and irregular voters, and suffered from weak state-party investment and an “inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters.” Reuters reports that DNC Chair Ken Martin released the report under pressure while disavowing it as incomplete and below his standards.

The Guardian’s review of the autopsy is even more damning: the report analyzes the male voter gap, rural gap, suburban gap, and Latino shift, but does not examine whether Harris’s race and gender shaped voter perception, media coverage, or attacks against her. It also notes the report’s claim that only about $150 million of a roughly $2 billion campaign was spent on voter contact, while over $1 billion went to media.

This is the insult inside the injury: Black women are expected to save democracy, then their labor is treated like background noise. AP VoteCast found that about 9 in 10 Black women supported Harris in 2024, and AP reported that Black women often carry much of the get-out-the-vote work in their communities. Yet after the election, many politically engaged Black women said they were reassessing how much of themselves they would continue giving to a country and political system that often fails to stand with them.

At the same time, Black male voters cannot be treated as an afterthought, a stereotype, or a panic button. Reuters reported before the 2024 election that an NAACP poll found 26% of Black men under 50 supported Trump, compared with 49% for Harris, and that economic issues were especially salient for younger Black men. The DNC autopsy similarly said male voters of color require direct engagement, economic messaging, and serious outreach rather than assumptions.

A CRT analysis names the structure clearly: white supremacy attacks Black voters from the outside through maps, courts, disinformation, and state power; institutions can also weaken Black power from the inside by extracting Black women’s organizing labor while failing to invest deeply in Black communities, Black men, and the South.

Andrew Young’s condemnation of the Court’s Voting Rights Act rollback lands with moral force because he remembers the law’s birth. He was in the room with Martin Luther King Jr. when President Johnson urged Congress to pass voting-rights legislation after Selma; now, that legacy is being chipped away in legal language.

The answer is not despair. It is repair with muscle: fair maps, state voting-rights acts, congressional action, court reform, local organizing, sustained Black civic investment, and a politics that stops praising Black voters only after it needs them.