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racism
Nine Justices in Black Who Rule White
The Supreme Court has been a bastion of white supremacy for generations. If it guts what remains of the Voting Rights Act, get ready to raise hell.
Nov 20, 2025
Fifty-seven years ago, I authored an article in the New York Times Magazine provocatively titled: “Nine Men in Black Who Think White.” It argued that the Supreme Court had long been one of the major roadblocks to progress on racial justice in this country.
Today, the nine black-robed Supreme Court justices include two Black justices, one Latina, and four women. Yet, all the evidence suggests that given the balance of forces on the court, they continue to “rule white,” undermining the dreams of a more racially just nation. Yes, three of the justices care deeply about racial justice, but they are only three of nine.
Next year, this Court is poised to further gut the signature piece of racial justice legislation of the last century, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Movements across the nation need to make it clear to the world that this is unacceptable.
Those of us who share dream that our Declaration of Independence and Constitution would help create a country and legal system dedicated to liberty and equality have, for most of the nation's history, been sorely disappointed.
The Supreme Court and Segregation
Yes, the Supreme Court briefly awakened to the “Equal Justice Under Law” motto engraved into its entrance with its famous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In this decision, the court signaled the death knell of legalized racial segregation by rendering such segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Three cheers. But then it returned to its old habits right up to this current dangerous moment in history.
First a little background.
Rarely has the United States Supreme Court paid much attention to this country's Declaration of Independence and its stirring statement that all men are created equal. Instead, our forefathers built slavery into our legal system, adding a clause allowing for the nation's slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in Congress.
After our bloody Civil War, with Northerners in control of Congress, the United States passed strong equal rights constitutional amendments during the period known as Reconstruction. But that era proved short-lived.
It will come as little surprise that the Supreme Court has spent much of the ensuing six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts weakening key parts of both.
In 1874, the Supreme Court struck down key sections of these laws, leaving Southern states in control of race relations as soon as Congress ended Reconstruction two years later. This opened the doors for Southern politicians and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan to terrorize the freed slaves and Southern politicians to retake control of Southern states and local governments and their local law enforcement apparatus and return property and plantations to former white owners.
Then, in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the Supreme Court fully codified Jim Crow, establishing the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine (in this case, segregated railway cars were ruled legal so long as they were “equal”).
As bad as that was, it turned out even worse as Southern states largely ignored the “equal" part, giving the nation what amounted to a judicial seal of approval on Southern segregation.
Turning Back the Clock
Many believe that this era ended in 1954 with the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, in which the Supreme Court declared that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in public schools. At that time, schools across the entire South, from Maryland and Delaware to Texas, were segregated.
Yet in my 1968 “Nine Men in Black” piece, I argued that the 1954 decision was a lone beacon of legal hope surrounded by decades of racist rulings, both before and after that decision. Just one year after the Brown decision, in 1955, the court ruled that Southern public schools needed time to figure out how to integrate.
Today, in both North and South, many schools are still largely segregated, and the Supreme Court and most lower courts have given up seeking workable court orders. Put simply, “more time” turned into endless time, and Black students have continued to suffer the results.
Starting in the early 1930s, the legendary legal genius Thurgood Marshall joined the NAACP’s legal team as the organization built its early Southern school desegregation work. The team executed its case-by-case strategy, leading up to the Brown ruling in 1954. These cases led to many successful outcomes, which changed the reach of the separate but equal doctrine. Marshall then led the team that won the Brown case.
Yet, when Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court himself 13 years after the Brown decision, his crusade to end racial injustices hit roadblock after roadblock. The court greeted Marshall's appointment with two devastating 5-4 opinions. The first involved the NAACP's attempt to address whites who had fled across state lines to avoid integrating schools in their original state or in their new state. The second case involved Texas, where the legislature established school districts that placed low-income students, mostly Black students, in poorly performing schools.
Two Interwoven Histories
As Howard Zinn reminds us in his powerful People’s History of the United States, our nation has always had two forces that shape history, inextricably interwoven.
One consists of the powerful, but the second consists of those who have opposed the powerful. Most history is written uncritically about the former, the people and corporations and government institutions that have oppressed people in this country and around the world. But equally important has been the second strand, the social movements that have risen in opposition to fight for people and justice and the environment.
Few movements have been as powerful as the civil rights movement, which Marshall and Ella Baker and A. Philip Randolph and others helped get off the ground in the 1930s. The movement gained momentum after the 1954 Brown decision, even in the face of the murders of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and the Kennedy brothers, as well as volunteers, by killers that included police and sheriffs.
Fight like hell to write and pass replacement statutes even better than what the current administration and its followers have destroyed.
Yet the movement’s marches and protests and the countless jail terms of its leaders culminated in two landmark pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This period is often referred to as the Second Reconstruction.
The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public places, employment, and federally funded programs. The Voting Rights Act the following year prohibited racial discrimination in voting, massively increasing voter turnout and voter registrations, particularly among Black people.
I got a deep sense of the power of the civil rights movement and the obstacles it faced in 1963. After graduating from law school, I volunteered to work on the overworked, minuscule legal staff of the NAACP, under the renowned Robert L. Carter, participant with Thurgood Marshall in the Brown case.
Testing me, he immediately sent me to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I slept for safety on the floor between beds in a Black motel. In New York, Carter assigned me to a difficult Northern public school class action case, where the judge implied the reason why Black students assigned to a virtually all-Black school did not do well was due to their intelligence level. Litigating before these judges was quite an eye opener. But the power of the civil rights movement, with Northerners working with Southerners, Blacks with whites, was imprinted on my soul.
Prepare to Raise Hell
It will come as little surprise that the Supreme Court has spent much of the ensuing six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts weakening key parts of both.
The one that today stands dangerously close to emasculation is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was already seriously eroded by the Supreme Court decisions in 2013 and 2021.
Then, this fall, the Supreme Court heard a case, Louisiana v. Callais, that threatens to erase much of Section 2 of the act, one of the few tools we still have to prevent racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. The reports from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in October suggested the court is likely to rule in 2026 to weaken Section 2.
With such a ruling, as former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams put it in The Atlantic: “We will not have free and fair elections in this country going forward” because “for the vast majority of people of color in this country, you will not be permitted to have access to a truly representative democracy.”
As we fight back, we should all be inspired by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s words in 1992, after he had dissented on hundreds of Supreme Court rulings between 1967 and 1991:
We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away.
We should listen to Bishop William Barber, who has mobilized tens of thousands of people through the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach. Bishop Barber has kept his attention solidly focused on building movements that link the South with the North. He has called for a Third Reconstruction, which has been encapsulated in a Congressional Resolution to end systemic racism and poverty, as well as militarism and environmental destruction.
For those of you who worked hard to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, for those of you who have just joined the fight for racial justice, I say this. Forget your sadness and your despair. Fight like hell to write and pass replacement statutes even better than what the current administration and its followers have destroyed.
Raise hell if the Supreme Court further guts the Voting Rights Act. Dare to dream of and build a world without discrimination.
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Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s Bigoted Vision of America
The hatefulness and histrionics of Trump's allies exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.
Nov 08, 2025
The selection of musical megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles. The ostensive reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”
For the new form of conservativism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow, and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny. Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren, meanwhile, claimed Bad Bunny is “Not an American artist.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson not only mislabeled Bad Bunny as “Bad Bunny Rabbit,” he argued Bad Bunny was not a role model, calling for replacing him with someone with “broader Appeal,” like 82-year-old Lee Greenwood.
The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: what is America and how should it be represented?
The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves. For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American demonstrates profound ignorance. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a United States citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a US possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.
As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024, and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something that residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others, including the authors here, do not support mass ICE roundups. Such free speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago, and is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it towards our laudable goals of freedom and equality.
Further, Bad Bunny singing in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its dominant language, English. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue of Spanish. While Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration does not carry the weight of law. That edict also appears to run afoul of a host of US Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual country, including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols. holding that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.
The United States of America is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands that were conquered during a period of US imperial expansion in the 19th century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since WWI, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great. So, why being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican makes of Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA cohorts?
For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities, and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color, and immigrants (except for white ones).
Puerto Ricans, a Spanish-speaking, Latin American people of color (who also happen to be US citizens), do not fit the MAGA mold, and Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.
Previous Super Bowl halftime performers, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best (and diverse) talents, but suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough? Turning Point USA’s “All American” alternative halftime show is quite revealing of MAGA’s cultural whitewashing attempts by promising “Anything in English.”
This piece was first published in the Miami Herald.
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Trump Ripped for 'Absurdly Low' and 'Racist' Refugee Cap Prioritizing White South Africans
"Let's call this what it is—white supremacy disguised as refugee policy," said the head of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
Oct 30, 2025
After months of reporting, President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday officially announced that it is restricting the number of refugees for this fiscal year to 7,500, with most spots going to white South Africans—a policy swiftly denounced by human rights advocates and Democrats in Congress.
"This decision doesn't just lower the refugee admissions ceiling. It lowers our moral standing," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge. "For more than four decades, the US refugee program has been a lifeline for families fleeing war, persecution, and repression. At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the program's purpose as well as its credibility."
The Trump administration's notice in the Federal Register doesn't mention any groups besides Afrikaners, white descendants of Europeans who subjected South Africa's majority Black population to a system of apartheid for decades. Multiple rich Trump backers—including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sacks, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel—spent time in the country during those years.
The 7,500 cap, initially reported earlier this month, is a significant drop from both the 40,000 limit that was previously reported as under consideration by the Republican administration, and the more than 100,000 allowed under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
Four congressional Democrats who serve as ranking members on related committees—Reps. Jamie Raskin (Md.) and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), along with Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Alex Padilla (Calif.)—issued a joint statement condemning the new cap, which they noted is "an astonishing 94% cut over last year and the lowest level in our nation's history."
"To add insult to injury, the administration is skipping over the tens of thousands of refugees who have been waiting in line for years in dire circumstances to come to the United States, and it is instead prioritizing a single privileged racial group—white South African Afrikaners—for these severely limited slots," they said. "This bizarre presidential determination is not only morally indefensible, it is illegal and invalid."
The four lawmakers continued:
The administration has brazenly ignored the statutory requirement to consult with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees before setting the annual refugee admissions ceiling. That process exists to ensure that decisions of such great consequence reflect our nation's values, our humanitarian commitments, and the rule of law, not the racial preferences or political whims of any one president.
The reason for this evasion is evident: The administration knows it cannot defend its egregious policy before Congress or the American people. While nearly 130,000 vetted, approved refugees—men, women, and children fleeing persecution and violence—wait in limbo after being promised a chance at safety, Donald Trump is looking to turn refugee admissions into another political giveaway for his pet projects and infatuations.
We reject this announcement as both unlawful and contrary to America's longstanding commitment to offer refuge to the persecuted. To twist our refugee policy into a partisan straightjacket is to betray both our legal obligations and our moral identity as a nation.
"Let's call this what it is—white supremacy disguised as refugee policy," declared Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. "At a time when Black refugees from Haiti, Sudan, the Congo, and Cameroon are drowning at sea, languishing in detention, or being deported to death, the US government has decided to open its arms to those who already enjoy global privilege. This is not just immoral—it's anti-Blackness codified into federal policy."
This week alone, Hurricane Melissa killed more than 20 people in Haiti, and health officials said that the Rapid Support Forces, which are fighting against Sudan's government, killed over 1,500 people—including more than 460 systematically slaughtered at a maternity hospital—in the city of el-Fasher.
"We reject the idea that whiteness equates to worthiness," Jozef said of Trump's new refugee plan. She also took aim at the president's broader anti-immigrant policy, which has included deporting hundreds of people to El Salvador's so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
"From Del Rio to Lampedusa, Black migrants and other immigrants of color have been criminalized, beaten, caged, and disappeared in CECOT camp in El Salvador—while their humanity is debated like a policy variable," she said. "This moment demands our humanity, our resistance, not silence."
Amy Fischer, Amnesty International USA's director for refugee and migrant rights, also tied Thursday's announcement to the broader agenda of the president—who, during his first term, faced global condemnation for policies including the forcible separation of families at the southern border.
"Setting this cap at such an absurdly low number and prioritizing white Afrikaners is a racist move that will turn the US's back on tens of thousands of people around the world who are fleeing persecution, violence, and human rights abuses," said Fischer. "Refugees have a human right to protection, and the international community—including the United States—has a responsibility to uphold that right."
"This announcement is yet another attack by the Trump administration on refugees and immigrants, showing disregard for international systems meant to protect human rights," she added. "The Trump administration must reverse course and ensure a fair, humane, and rights-based refugee admissions determination."
The announcement came just days after Trump's nominee to be ambassador to South Africa, far-right media critic Brent Bozell, faced intense criticism for refusing to say whether he would support or oppose repealing laws allowing Black Americans to vote during his Senate confirmation hearing.
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