The Voting Rights Act was not racial favoritism. It was a protection created in response to a long and documented history of racial violence and exclusion. However, the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais recently weakened Voting Rights significantly.
I want to help simplify what the court’s decision means for all of us by framing it this way: the Voting Rights Act as a restraining order.
I know a restraining order analogy may sound far-fetched at first. A domestic violence protective order and federal voting-rights legislation are different kinds of law. But as a practicing lawyer who works in criminal cases (and disability rights), the analogy feels true to something I see often: the legal system can recognize abuse in the crisis moment, impose protection, and then later grow impatient with the very protection it created. It’s when the abusers are treated as victims of the very protections created to prevent them from repeating that history.
Imagine this: a woman comes into court and says, “He hurt me. He threatened me. He knows where I live. I need protection.”
The court does not say, “Well, a restraining order treats him differently from every other man, and that feels unfair.”
Of course it treats him differently. That is the point.
The order exists because of what he did, what he has shown he is capable of doing, and what the court has reason to believe he may do again if nobody stops him.
What I think is missing from a lot of the discussion around Louisiana v. Callais is this history. Not decorative history. Not “Black History Month” history. I mean the actual legal and violent history that explains why the Voting Rights Act exists in the first place.
Let’s start here: Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857. One of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history was made by the majority vote of the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Not property rights. Not privacy. Not business. Not bodily freedom. Black people could be treated as property, as “merchandise,” he wrote, as people outside the protection of citizenship.
That was American constitutional law.
The Supreme Court did not later wake up, apologize, and say, “Our mistake.” Dred Scott was not politely corrected by the Court. It was answered by war—our American Civil War—then by constitutional amendments, and federal power.
That is where the “Reconstruction Amendments,” the 13th, 14th, and 15th, come in. The 13th Amendment said: you cannot have human slavery anymore. The 14th Amendment said: and no, we are not going back to Dred Scott. Black people are citizens. People born or naturalized here are citizens. This is what Asians and Germans and others benefit from, too. States cannot deny equal protection of the laws. The 15th Amendment said: and you cannot deny the vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Because when we talk about civil rights protections, we are not talking about “special treatment.” We are talking about protection from a known abuser.
In fact, the very next day after the Louisiana v. Callais Supreme Court ruling, all of the same Southern states that once made up the Confederacy began redrawing voting maps that are identical to the maps that led to the act’s passage in the first place.
The Voting Rights Act and Amendments were not an insult to the South. They are not a punishment for being Black or for being misunderstood farmers who love God. They are legal protections created because this country had already seen exactly what states would do when left alone with Black rights.
So we are going to shore up the restraining order, our nation decided. We are going to require oversight. We are going to look at results, not just polite explanations. We are going to recognize that a state can say “race-neutral” while producing the same old racial exclusion. That is the part Louisiana v. Callais refuses to honor.
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The history of voting in this country has never been ordinary for Black people. Poll taxes and literacy tests were not ordinary. Lynching in response to voting was not ordinary.
The Voting Rights Act was not created for ordinary circumstances. It was created because ordinary constitutional promises had failed Black people (and all Americans) again and again.
That is the harm of Louisiana v. Callais. It takes a protection built in response to racial violence and racial exclusion, then treats the protection itself as the constitutional problem.
All of this is about whether the law can still recognize an abuser after he changes clothes, changes language, and prays that Bible verse, “God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” until we talk about being godly.
Practicing criminal attorney Natashia Deón is a novelist who teaches creative writing at UCLA and Antioch University.