The Political Economy of Black Immobility

The damage the Supreme Court and President Trump has inflicted on the political and economic mobility of Black Americans is so wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.

In a fait accompli for Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court significantly eroded another key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 ruling, dealing a devastating blow to a crown jewel of civil rights-era law and the future of Black political representation. In a prior case, Thornburg v. Gingles, the court held that “[t]he essence of a §2 claim is that a certain electoral law, practice, or structure interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by black and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.” With §2 intact, plaintiffs could challenge efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, including racial gerrymanders. Without it, as Justice Elena Kagan writes in her dissent last week in Louisiana v. Callais, “a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

Wasting no time, the Tennessee GOP passed legislation to crack the state’s only Democratic-held U.S. House seat. Louisiana’s governor said he would suspend the May 16 party primaries to redraw the state’s map to cut the majority-Black district struck down by the court, leaving only one other. Alabama has also entered the chat and will now convene a special session.

Part of the independent harms of partisan and racial gerrymandering are that they constrain Black political mobility—i.e., the capacity of a politically cohesive group to shift within the political hierarchy by electing candidates of their choice. Political scientists have long regarded the “[t]he Voting Rights Act [as] one of the most important—if not the most important—public policies developed over the last half century to increase access to the U.S. political system for people of color.” In 1967, two years after the VRA went into effect, for example, Cleveland, Ohio and Gary, Indiana became the first major American cities to elect Black mayors. By the 1970s, a growing number of Black candidates were being elected in congressional, state, and municipal races across the country. That happened because the VRA enforced the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

But the court’s new opinion is just the latest affront to Black mobility. When it upended affirmative action in 2023, Black enrollment in selective colleges, including law schools, experienced large drops in enrollment for the first time in a more than a decade. The Trump Administration, meanwhile, has attacked diversity efforts in a way that has derailed or ended the careers of thousands of Black civil servants, including military personnel, effectively imperiling a Black middle class built on federal employment. Now, a class action lawsuit charges that the some of these firings were “intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce people of color, women, non-binary employees, and those, like Plaintiffs, who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups.”

In the process, the administration and its allies have also broken the ladder of upward mobility for low-income Black Americans at the bottom rung. While conservative policy entrepreneurs often promote the so-called “success sequence” as a solution to poverty—i.e., graduate high school, get a fulltime job, and marry before children—federal initiatives that attempt to increase high school graduation, college going rates among low-income students (e.g., TRIO), or job training (e.g., JobCorps), are among the “woke” programs the president wants to eliminate. Even among those who achieve all three milestones in the sequence, “[B]lacks are significantly less likely to reach the middle class than whites who do the same.” To the extent these programs promote ladder economics and pathways to the American Dream, their absence will have significant consequences for the eighteen percent of young Black men and the 15% of young Black women not in education, employment or training (NEETs), as well as others. 

The court’s opinion on Wednesday is no doubt the final stage of a decades long project to return the limits of Black political mobility. It worked: the court has effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act and Black representation will suffer as a result. But the broader pattern of policymaking is about more than Black voting power. It also transgresses the political economy of far too many Black Americans—i.e., their ability to control and survive their social, political, and economic life. 

Today, inequalities in law and policy are being brought about by a renewed racial retrenchment, by Redemption-era grievance, and by a longing of some to return power to those whom President Andrew Johnson believed it belonged:

“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

If we’re not more careful, we may be looking down at the welcome mat of the next nadir.

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Nyron N. Crawford, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Temple University. He is also author of Marked Men: Black Politicians and the Racialization of Scandal (NYU Press 2024).