Racism, Victimhood, and Louisiana v. Callais

In one of last week’s columns, I said something that generated a little bit of feedback; namely, I said that modern victimhood culture leads to the end of civilization because its proponents blow up the rules by which civilization is agreed on.

And without dragging the reader of this column through that previous argument, I’ll explain the point this way — people whose goal is to achieve their own victimhood will act in highly destructive and irrational ways. Or at least, irrational in any other respect outside of achieving victimhood.

An example I gave was the video of the Antifa agitator in Portland berating an ICE officer and then spitting on him, which generated the predictable result that Antifa Boy was promptly roughly arrested, and that was the result he was looking for. The rough arrest made him a victim, you see, and if the video was edited just right, the arresting officers would then be made to look like thugs.

Victimhood culture is poison. It’s very, very bad stuff. Eventually the infrastructure on which it depends frays and then tears. Which, of course, is the aim of victimhood culture, and then the “victims” almost immediately morph into the aggressors.

But only in one scenario.

In another, the people accused as victimizers stop caring about the accusation.

As I noted, the practitioners of this grift in the modern political arena are riding on the coattails of the Civil Rights movement, which used nonviolent means to highlight the victimization of the black community by racist Southern society. And those methods were adopted from the nonviolent struggle that Mohandas Gandhi and the Indian independence movement adopted in its efforts to throw off British rule.

But Gandhi himself, asked once whether his methods would be successful in varying circumstances, unequivocally stated the answer was no. Specifically, he said that if it was Nazi Germany rather than the British Empire that held India under its boot, nonviolent methods would be suicidal.

It takes a moral society to redress victimhood. Any other will be thoroughly unmoved.

And that’s true when the victimhood is real. When it’s fake and contrived, which is the case with respect to the modern practitioners of victimhood culture, even a moral society is within its bounds to reject it.

I bring this up because of something that I can only describe as both incomprehensible and illuminating. Specifically, this…

🚨 BREAKING: In an insane move, Justice Ketanji Jackson declares we need to draw Congressional districts based on race because black people are like disabled people pic.twitter.com/JGLk7aJKlM

“They don’t have equal access to the voting system. They’re DISABLED!”

This is utter…

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 15, 2025

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the Supreme Court’s chief practitioner of victimhood culture. In fact, her entire existence on the Court is a function of victimhood; she was, after all, nominated by Joe Biden expressly because she is black and female, and those were the two immutable characteristics to which Biden limited his pool of nominees.

Limiting a pool of applicants to only a specific race is the very essence of racism and the antithesis of meritocracy — which was the basis under which America adopted the narrative of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. captured the nation’s imagination in his famous 1963 Washington Mall speech when he asked that we not judge by the color of skin but by the content of character.

And some 60-odd years later Charlie Kirk was castigated as a racist for applying King’s formula to Jackson’s confirmation on the Supreme Court and finding it wanting.

That’s what victimhood culture has done.

Almost nobody is satisfied with Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Court. I’m not sure how satisfied black people are. A couple of my black friends, one of whom is a Democrat (I’m working on her, though), cannot stop expressing how embarrassing she is based on the stupid things she says even inside the ambit of her job on the Court.

Biden’s everlasting shame in this case (there are many other cases, of course) is that by saddling the black community with Jackson, who is far and away the dumbest and least analytical justice in the building and who lacks the respect even of the other two leftists on the Court, he sentenced them to long-lasting embarrassment.

But the criteria that unjustly elevated her beyond her capabilities also apply to Congress and how its districts are drawn, which makes it unsurprising that Jackson would resort to the stupid arguments she does in defense of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the central statute at issue in the Louisiana v. Callais case the Court heard oral arguments in on Wednesday.

Because black victimhood in the Jim Crow South all those years ago must apparently be served forever, according to Ketanji Brown Jackson and the current luminaries of the “civil rights” movement. And the civil rights in question apparently include the right to win elections.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the legal lodgepole that creates a necessity for affirmative action/DEI congressional districts for black Democrat politicians. And I’m styling it that way because there are so many black politicians who have been able to win elections for major political offices that it’s utterly unremarkable when one wins a statewide office or a seat in a majority-white district somewhere.

Ilhan Omar getting elected in a 70 percent white congressional district puts paid to any notion that white voters won’t vote for a black politician. If you’ll vote for Omar, to say that you aren’t bigoted against black people is just about the only kind thing I can say about you. Many of those same people elected Keith Ellison to Congress and then made him Minnesota’s attorney general.

As Daniel Cameron was elected Kentucky’s attorney general, as a Republican. Mark Robinson (North Carolina) and Winsome Earle-Sears (Virginia) were elected lieutenant governor in Southern states. Robinson ran and lost for governor, while Earle-Sears could well win her race for that position this year.

As could Congressman Byron Donalds in Florida next year.

Tim Scott is already a U.S. senator, you know. From South Carolina.

I could regale the reader with many more successful black candidates who have won over majority-white constituencies. The idea that black politicians must have black districts in order to be successful is utter bunkum; it is forwarded by people whose “disability,” to use Jackson’s term, is ideological rather than racial.

The Callais case arises from a lawsuit filed by white voters against the state of Louisiana for drawing a majority-black congressional district under pressure from an Obama-appointed federal judge in Baton Rouge. The suit alleged that the racially gerrymandered Sixth Congressional District, a Rorschach test monstrosity stretching from Baton Rouge northwest to Shreveport, violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause, and both the Western District of Louisiana and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

The current officeholder in that district, an omnipresent political cat named Cleo Fields who is regarded as a joke by virtually everyone in Louisiana outside of his hardcore supporters, threw in an argument as the case wound its way to Washington that Jackson would echo. Fields asked, “How many Blacks have Louisiana elected to Congress from a majority white district? The answer to that is zero. Without the Voting Rights Act, people of color don’t have an opportunity to participate in the process.”

I asked in response what Fields has done to make himself marketable to white voters and have not received an answer. The reason is that there is no answer to be had; Fields’ entire political career fits inside a petri dish of black victimhood and grievance and depends on the assuagement of that grievance with goodies from the public trough.

Like a ready-made congressional seat, which Fields has had drawn for him not once but twice. If the Callais case results in a redrawn Louisiana congressional map, it will be the second time his district has been struck down for racial gerrymandering; the first time was in the early 1990s.

And if Callais goes the way it appeared it might from the oral arguments presented Wednesday and the justices’ reactions, there will be a goodly number of sad Cleo Fieldses.

And Hank Johnsons. And Bennie Thompsons and Frederica Wilsons. And other members of the Congressional Black Caucus representing electric-blue, majority-black districts in red states. Because those Republican Southern states forced to carve out DEI districts to pay for the sins of ancient and long-dead Democrats won’t continue honoring this fraudulent victimhood, you see, and their legislators will go to work in redrawing maps to introduce merit as a metric of success where victimization currently rests.

Does that mean fewer members of the Congressional Black Caucus? Sure, maybe. It does mean the character of successful black politicians will necessarily change. It means we would likely see more Harold Fords and less Sheila Jackson Lees.

And that would be of great benefit not just to America as a whole but to the black community. Maybe even to the Democrat Party, though that isn’t a consideration any of us should spend much time contemplating.

Callais isn’t decided yet, so this is all speculative. Aspirational. But after Wednesday’s oral arguments in the case, what’s clear is that victimhood is a very poor substitute for merit. And there is now an opportunity to free ourselves from one major manifestation of that substitution.