U.S. Supreme Court judges on Tuesday presented their differences on the issue of race when examining a map of the state of Alabama’s constituencies accused of diminishing the influence of black voters who tend to vote Democrats.
Because the Conservative Majority Court could use it to cut the scope of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the case gained a lot of attention as it prevented segregationist states at the time from depriving African Americans of the right to vote.
Progressive judge Elena Kagan said, “The Voting Rights Act is one of the greatest advances of our democracy (…) and aims to ensure that African Americans have the same political rights as whites.” cases by the court.
The court is examining a map redrawn in 2021 by Alabama Republican lawmakers to allocate House seats. According to this new distribution, black voters, representing 27% of the population, are a majority in only one of the seven counties and dispersed in the other six.
In Alabama, as in many southern states, African Americans mostly vote Democrats, while whites tend to support Republicans. It is therefore suspected that the new election map is in favor of the Republican Party.
To neutralize the map, citizens and associations filed a lawsuit accusing lawmakers of violating the “Voting Rights Act,” which prohibits the dilution of African American votes.
Earlier this year, a lower court found them right and ordered a new distribution, but Republican officials took the case to the Supreme Court.
In February, five of the nine magistrates allowed to continue the 2021 election distribution – allowing validity for the November midterm elections – deferring the review.
The court debated for several hours in a public hearing this Tuesday.
The Alabama state attorney argued that the United States Constitution prohibits the use of ethnicity to determine constituencies. Conservative judge Samuel Alito said he supported the idea, emphasizing the importance of having “racially neutral maps”.
African-American judge Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized this notion. According to him, the principle of equality among all Americans “is not a separate concept of race” and was adopted after the liberation of slaves “to ensure equal treatment of people who have been discriminated against in the past”.
The case is the first of several cases the Court will consider at the end of October, in addition to college admissions programs that promote ethnic diversity and are considered discriminatory by Republicans.
source: Noticias
