Stacey Abrams and the Left Redefine Jim Crow

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 18, 2026

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson probably thought his restatement of the logic that led a majority of Supreme Court justices to declare majority-minority districts unconstitutional was relatively banal. When asked to respond to his remarks, however, perennial candidate Stacey Abrams saw the pernicious prejudice embedded in Johnson’s rejection of discrimination “on the basis of race.”

 

“He’s saying it brings back 1964, 1963, 1892,” Abrams said of the Supreme Court decision and Johnson’s appreciation of it. “Race neutrality has never been neutral,” she added. Indeed, Abrams listed the many ways in which black Americans were disenfranchised in the past: poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause (in which one could bypass racial voting restrictions if one’s ancestors were allowed to exercise the franchise prior to the Civil War).

 

Each of these obstacles has been demolished, and some might say that constitutes progress. Not Abrams. “Race and partisanship sit side-by-side in the South,” she said, illustrating why her fellow southerners regularly deny statewide electoral victories to her. “What he’s celebrating is the return of Jim Crow to the South,” Abrams said in closing, “and that is a terrible thing for America.”

 

Progressive opinion-makers appear to share Abrams’s bleak outlook.

 

Writing in The Guardian, columnist Jamil Smith denounced the Court’s decision in Callais and the finding that the courts should intervene in state-level redistricting schemes only when race is too much of a factor driving reapportionment. “Discrimination does not announce itself,” he wrote. “The intent standard is the cloak of the coward.” NPR’s hosts appear to agree. According to Code Switch host Gene Demby, “The political power of Democrats in this country and black voters, in particular, is likely to be hugely eroded.” The specter of Jim Crow has “taken flight again,” a Seattle Times headline blared.

 

Democratic lawmakers share the professional left’s apprehension. Representative Hank Johnson accused the Court of having “put us back in a position where Jim Crow can be the rule of the day for Black people.” Representative Bennie Thompson accused the GOP via the courts of “kicking black folk out of Congress.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was, perhaps, the most theatrical in his condemnations. “The ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now,” he said of the Court’s “unprecedented assault on black political power,” unseen “since the Jim Crow era.”

 

Of course, the Supreme Court majority’s alleged racism does not begin and end with its efforts to resolve the conflict between the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. If the Court doesn’t advance Democratic political objectives, even when doing so would be to violate its own remit, the Court is racist. At least, that’s what former Vice President Kamala Harris claimed this weekend when the Court would not review a state-level judgment against Democrats who violated their state constitution in their effort to expel all but one Republican from the Virginia congressional delegation. “What they have done with this decision, by saying that the politics of redistricting is OK, is they are back-dooring racism through politics,” she wrote.

 

We have reached the point at which explicitly prohibiting racial discrimination is tantamount to state-sponsored bigotry. Indeed, the only intellectual support for that notion seems to be the claim that the social contract in the American South is wholly indistinguishable from the one that prevailed in 1965 — an argument that the courts have rejected over and over again.

 

Democrats seem genuinely convinced by this unconvincing argument. Indeed, to hear them tell it, there’s no end to the evidence that Jim Crow is alive and thriving.

 

Joe Biden promulgated dubious claims and outright lies about Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 to allege that what the state was doing was worse than “Jim Crow 2.0.” Georgia had made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” the senescent president declared. Much of his party agreed, and the instruments of Democratic soft power — Hollywood, professional sports, and the undifferentiated denizens of the C-suite — rained opprobrium down on Georgia, even going so far as to boycott the state. No one who participated in this campaign performed any soul-searching when it turned out that the number of early Democratic voters who were supposed to be disenfranchised by the law turned out in greater numbers in 2022 than they had in 2020.

 

Voter identification laws, too, have long been denounced by Democrats as a manifestation of vestigial racism. “You would have thought that after all we have gone through as a country to make sure that people have the right to vote, regardless of the color of their skin,” Senator Bernie Sanders once said of voter ID, “that these Republican governors would show some mercy and not try to bring us back to Jim Crow days.” Hillary Clinton concurred, calling Alabama’s voter ID requirements “a blast from the Jim Crow past.”

 

Even the 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned explicit racial preferences in college admissions was said by the Congressional Black Caucus to herald the return of “Jim Crow.” Surely, since the CBC needed no evidence to render that conclusion, the fact that the Court’s decision has had a negligible impact on black and Hispanic college enrollment will not prompt its members to revisit it.

 

More than a decade into the Democratic campaign to declare race-neutrality a species of racial discrimination, we can conclude that Democrats have incorporated a key tenet of “anti-racist” doctrine into their policy preferences. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” as the “anti-racist” philosopher Ibram X. Kendi put it. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” In short, color blindness before the law is neither possible nor desirable.

 

The courts aren’t buying it. The voters don’t seem to be either. Indeed, it’s unclear who the audience for this sort of thing is beyond those who are already wholly converted to the progressive cause.