Thread by @JoyAnnReid

There's a symmetry between the Republican push to remove the Voting Rights Act's protections of voters of color and the frantic drive to protect the whitewashed history that has prevailed since the confederate generals dictated how we would remember the civil war & its aftermath.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1410628913668268034

Taken as a whole, the moves by the six Roberts court conservatives and Republicans in statehouses, localities and congress would banish all memory of America's abuse of nonwhite people and then freeze in place every advantage that this historic abuse created for white citizens.

It all goes back to this fear of demographic change and the drive to protect a constituency that John Roberts and Alito seem to be as focused on as McConnell and Trump: white conservative Christians, who they seem to believe deserve the advantages, as the "real" Americans.

Or alternately, they believe white Americans are now the true victims of discrimination, by virtue of the very laws enacted to correct the Constitution's original exclusion of enslaved Black and indigenous people as citizens, and gave women only limited benefits of citizenship.

And they're doing it by re-interpreting calls for equal treatment as calls for historical revenge. So the Voting Rights Act must go because it somehow unleashes unfair vengeance upon the Southern states that made Black voters guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap to vote.

Would Alito have ruled that demanding voters guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or take a literacy test isn't violative of the 15th Amendment because such rules didn't explicitly mention race? Would he have deemed those things mere "inconveniences?"

I mean so what if it turns out only voters of color are asked to guess? As long as there are other options for voting access it's fine, and not discrimination, amirite? Or if it's only majority nonwhite AZ neighborhoods that happen to get their precincts randomly moved? All good!

As long as Republican legislators don't spell out their plans or mention race explicitly, per Alito and Roberts and friends, you simply can't prove that an anti-voter law is racially discriminatory. Voila! No need for the VRA. Because (checks notes) America has **changed.**

It's part of an overall conservative mission: to redraw the lines on what "discrimination" and even racism are, so that those who have always been at the top of the socio-economic food chain can claim equal victimhood with those who have always been at the bottom. It's a THING.

Oh, and on Alito's "well there COULD be voting fraud" argument ... preventing voter fraud and preserving "election integrity" were the excuses used for the original Jim Crow anti-voter laws, too...