Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

In 2008 Obama not only won the presidency of a majority-white country; he did better among white voters in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia than John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Yet after the Supreme Court, in its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, effectively nullified Section 5’s “preclearance” provisions by ruling that Congress was using an outdated formula to determine which states must have federal oversight of their voting laws, Obama said he was “deeply disappointed,” and complained that the ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.” The president and others on the left wanted the court to ignore the fact that, as Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.” Roberts took Congress to task for pretending that nothing had changed in nearly half a century, writing: By the time the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored. During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers. And yet the coverage fo...