On April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais fundamentally changed the meaning of the anti-discrimination protections that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has provided for over 60 years. Upper School (US) students are concerned about not only what this means for the future of voting rights in America, but also what it says about the nation’s current political climate.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled that Section 2 could not be used as a rationale for why Louisiana needed to create a second Black-majority district. In 2022, after a group of Black voters went to federal court stating that the map did not represent the Black population of Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Fifth Circuit asked the state to create a second majority-Black district. In 2024, after the new map had been drawn, a group of voters filed a lawsuit claiming that the creation of this “majority-minority” district was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander; the argument was eventually taken by the Court and contributed to their most recent decision.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Section 2 originally prohibited voting standards, procedures, or practices that “discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.” In the past, Section 2 has been used by courts — including the Supreme Court just three years ago — to both prevent the use of maps deemed racial gerrymanders based on their effects on a racial minority and ask for the creation of majority-minority districts.
In Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in Callais, he wrote, “[T]his Court should never have interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’”
Not only does the new interpretation of Section 2 disallow it from being used to demand the creation of majority-minority districts, but it also makes it harder for a map to be found guilty of being a racial gerrymander. Anyone who wants to challenge a map that they believe is racially discriminatory must now show definitive proof that the intent behind the map was to disenfranchise a race.
This decision effectively allows states to create new maps with no majority Black districts, which will implicitly dilute the voting power of Black democrats and prevent them from being represented by those who serve their interests.
States determine their own redistricting methods. Traditionally, redistricting occurs after the census, but Trump’s push last summer for Texas Republicans to redistrict to stay in control of the U.S. House of Representatives caused a mid-decade redistricting war between Republicans and Democrats.
The Court’s decision triggered GOP-controlled Southern states to rush to draw aggressively gerrymandered districts that had previously been prohibited. Southern states’ eagerness to utilize the new lack of protections provided by Callais is due to the midterm elections, which are currently taking place or fast approaching. By creating these new districts, Republicans guarantee themselves safer seats in the House than Democrats, which will grant them greater political power.
New Jersey is reliably Democratic, meaning MFS students who vote Democratic are not at risk of having their voting power weakened. Even so, students are concerned about how this ruling could affect the voting rights of minorities in more vulnerable states.
Delaney Wiggins ’28 stated, “I think that this puts a lot of minorities, especially a lot of Black people, at risk for future voting. It’s really disheartening. It kind of feels like we’re going backwards in a sense.”
Wiggins believes that “the Republican Party in general” will be the beneficiary of this ruling, especially because “there aren’t a lot of Black Republicans.”
“[The Republican Party is] using this to their advantage, and that’s concerning. There should not be a taking away of Black voting rights; we fought for those years ago. This is a disgusting use of power,” she said.
Jade McRae ’26, a Black Student Union (BSU) co-facilitator, expressed a similar sentiment. After learning about the ruling through TikTok, she said she “wasn’t that surprised.”
“I think under this presidency, there’s a tendency to go backwards, and I think that’s what the goal is. Just knowing the things that the Supreme Court has passed in the past couple [of] years, it’s not that surprising,” she said.
McRae is worried about how rulings like this are not only becoming more prevalent but also more accepted by the American public. She believes that the Court’s ruling is, in part, a manifestation of a political climate in which people ignore issues that minorities are facing.
“I think that recent events and hate crimes are becoming less televised and less remembered. There was this other guy who got lynched in the South. I think things like that are coming back, and people are not really doing anything about it,” McRae said.
Though the ruling will not affect New Jersey, McRae anticipates hearing about the more personal aspects of its consequences on other states once she begins her freshman year at Howard University, a historically Black university (HBCU) located in Washington, D.C.
“Howard’s a pretty popular school. I know people will come from all over the country, and they will have stories about what’s happening, even though I haven’t heard anything directly yet,” McRae said.
“In the future, I will just try to continue to stay in places where I know my voice will be heard,” she added. “It’s just scary to think that this is happening.”
Ali Sabir ’26 sees this ruling as “a disaster” and “a massive step back.” He explained that it did not come out of left field, given that the topic of voting rights has always been contentious in political spaces.
“[The Court’s ruling] serves to further marginalize already marginalized communities. The right to vote is an essential part of what it means to be an American, and we’ve seen with the districting wars [that] that right has frequently come under attack for political gain,” Sabir articulated.
Sabir is deeply involved with civics and has worked on many campaigns, like Andy Kim’s and Quinton Law’s, from the county level to the presidential level. He stated that a removal of the VRA “wasn’t a main issue when [he] was campaigning in 2024,” given that it wasn’t a hot topic at the time.
Sabir doesn’t believe that the Court’s ruling will affect him, but he’s still concerned about what it means for people in other parts of the country.
“I think that this will be devastating for the representation of minorities in the South, particularly Black Americans and overall Black political power in the U.S., especially because most Black Americans live in the South,” Sabir said.
Expanding on his earlier point about the long-standing contention surrounding voting rights, Sabir mentioned recent discussions online about Chief Justice John Roberts’ apparent vendetta against minority voting rights dating back to the early 1980s.
Journalists and internet users have argued that the ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais has been a long time in the making, given Robert’s views on the matter. While Sabir “[doesn’t] know if that’s true or not,” he sees it as “an interesting argument.”
“A lot of the justices have what you could classify as political visions and political agendas. I know they might not like the idea of using political agendas, but at the very least, [they have] their own agenda of what the Constitution allows and what it doesn’t,” Sabir said.
Sabir emphasized the gravity of the Callais ruling, arguing that “[the Voting Rights Act] functioned [and] protected liberties the same way our Bill of Rights or our constitutional amendments do.”
“This isn’t a small loss from that era. This is one of the major milestones of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and others who marched with them, and [now] one of their achievements has been taken away,” Sabir stressed.
