Jim Crow 2.0: The Supreme Court Is Reconstructing Reconstruction

When the U.S. Supreme Court quietly cleared the way for Texas to implement a congressional map that a federal court found to be racially gerrymandered; it did more than intervene in an election. It reenacted a familiar American ritual: the judicial dismantling of Black political possibility.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, warned that the decision “disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.” She was, in effect, sounding an alarm that the majority refused to hear: the United States has entered Jim Crow Part Two, and the Supreme Court is once again its chief architect.

Republicans celebrated the ruling as a political victory. But history teaches us that the Court’s action is not merely political—it is structural, neurological, and deeply racialized. As I argue in Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness, America has perfected the ability to “rebrand domination as democracy and containment as fairness.” The Texas ruling is only the latest episode in a centuries-long pattern: whenever Black Americans inch toward full participation in the political system, the country’s legal institutions recalibrate to ensure that progress never becomes power.

This is not new. It is Reconstruction in reverse.

The Reconstruction Playbook, Reopened

After the Civil War, Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments in an attempt to secure citizenship and political rights for formerly enslaved people. For a brief moment, Black men voted in record numbers, held public office, and shaped the political destiny of the South. That moment lasted less than a decade.

Beginning in 1873 with The Slaughterhouse Cases, followed by United States v. Cruikshank (1876), The Civil Rights Cases (1883), and ultimately Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court hollowed the amendments of their meaning. The Court refused to protect Black people from racial terrorism, gutted federal protections, and declared segregation constitutional—all while insisting that its rulings were grounded in “neutral” principles of federalism.

What happened last week in Texas is a modern version of the same jurisprudential sleight of hand.

A lower court examined evidence and concluded that Texas intentionally diluted the power of Black and Latino voters. The Supreme Court responded not by evaluating the evidence, but by accusing the lower court of disrupting “the delicate federal-state balance.” In the late 19th century, the Court used this same language of “balance” and “neutrality” to protect white supremacy from the demands of multiracial democracy.

This is why I write in Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness that “the same legal system that birthed liberty also engineered containment.” The Court’s relationship to racial democracy has always been ambivalent at best, hostile at worst.

The Psychopathy of Whiteness as Legal Doctrine

What is happening today cannot be understood solely through legal analysis. It must also be understood through the psycho-political framework of whiteness—what I call Malignant Diabolical Psychopathy in my forthcoming book, The Psychopathy of Whiteness.

This framework describes how whiteness behaves as a psychological disorder: it denies reality, suppresses empathy, and rebrands violence as virtue. Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has served as the institutional nervous system of this disorder—translating racial anxiety into legal doctrine.

When the Court declares that deliberately racialized maps are simply partisan strategy, it is performing one of the core defense mechanisms of whiteness: dissociation. As I argue in my forthcoming book, The Psychopathy of Whiteness, dissociation enables whiteness to “commit violence while disidentifying from the violence committed.” This is why the Court can look directly at evidence of racial targeting and insist that race had nothing to do with it.

The Court’s majority is not interpreting the law—it is reenacting the ancestral trauma response of whiteness: protect power at all costs.

Modern Counter-Reconstruction: Shelby, Brnovich, and Now Texas

Texas is only the most recent battlefront. The Supreme Court has spent the last decade methodically demolishing the Voting Rights Act—the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted preclearance, declaring racism no longer a central threat in American elections. Within 24 hours, states rushed to implement laws targeting Black and Latino voters.

In 2021, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee made it nearly impossible to challenge discriminatory voting practices.

Now, the Court signals it is open to gutting Section 2, the law’s last surviving protection.

This is not legal drift—it is repetition. In The Psychopathy of Whiteness, I describe this cycle as “the neuro-political relapse of an identity structure that cannot tolerate accountability.” The backlash to Black visibility after George Floyd mirrors the backlash to Black enfranchisement after the Civil War. The tools are different—algorithms instead of literacy tests, gerrymanders instead of lynch mobs—but the intention is the same: to contain Black political power so that whiteness remains unchallenged.

Partisan Gerrymandering as Racial Gerrymandering in Disguise

Justice Samuel Alito insists that the Texas map is not evidence of racism but merely partisanship. This is the newest linguistic trick of Jim Crow 2.0: hide racial suppression inside the language of political strategy.

But when race and party cannot be disentangled—when 90 percent of Black voters predictably support one party—then “partisan advantage” becomes the socially acceptable euphemism for racial domination.

In Diagnosing Whiteness, I call this the “moral camouflage” of white supremacy: the ability to commit racial harm while insisting it is about something else.

The Court is not confused. It is complicit.

A Nation in Relapse

The Texas ruling is not merely a political event; it is a symptom. America is reliving an older pathology, one baked into the country’s genetic, legal, and spiritual code.

As I write in The Psychopathy of Whiteness: "Each ruling that protects white grievance over Black reality is an act of neuropolitical self-preservation.”

This is a country whose institutions are wired—neurologically and historically—to maintain white dominance. The Supreme Court is simply behaving as it was designed: not as the guardian of democracy, but as the custodian of whiteness, white supremacy, and racial hierarchy.

The problem is not the map. The problem is the mindset.

The Prescription: Reckoning, Repair-ations, and Negotiation

If America is in Jim Crow Part Two, then outrage is not enough. Treatment is required.

In The Psychopathy of Whiteness, I outline a three-stage healing framework:

1. Racial Reckoning – the diagnostic phase, where whiteness must admit its own sickness.

2. Repair-ations – the treatment phase, requiring resource transfer, policy transformation, and structural correction.

3. White Racial Negotiation – the maintenance phase, in which white people learn to relinquish unearned power and recalibrate the nation’s nervous system toward equity.

4. 
   

Without these steps, relapse is inevitable.

The Question Before Us

This Supreme Court has made its position clear: it will not protect multiracial democracy. It will not safeguard the 14th and 15th Amendments. It will not enforce the Voting Rights Act. It will not honor evidence of racial harm.

We are living through the collapse of the legal illusions that once held the country together.

The question, now, is not whether America is repeating history.

The question is whether we will survive the relapse.