Ron DeSantis is doing his best to nullify the Voting Rights Act.

In mid-August, lawyers representing Florida Republicans made a startling admission. The state’s new congressional map, drawn by governor Ron DeSantis, made it harder for Black voters in north Florida to elect the candidate of their choosing. On Sunday, a judge in Florida ruled the map was unlawful.

From 2016 until last year, Florida’s fifth congressional district had stretched more than 150 miles across the northern part of the state, from Jacksonville to just west of Tallahassee. It was a portion of the state once home to the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. In 2022, it was represented by Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, and 46% of eligible voters were Black.

That year, DeSantis went out of his way to chop the district up into four majority-white ones, all of which elected a Republican last fall.

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It was the kind of concession that politicians, wary of doing anything that could be perceived as motivated by racial animus, rarely make. And it was particularly striking in Florida, where a provision in the state’s constitution specifically outlaws diminishing the influence of Black voters in that way. Voters overwhelmingly approved that provision as part of a set of anti-gerrymandering reforms, called the fair districts amendment, in 2010.

Welp 2010 was another world. This is now, and racist gerrymandering is the hot new trend.

So it was no surprise that circuit judge J Lee Marsh struck down the map. “Under the stipulated facts [in the lawsuit], plaintiffs have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida constitution,” he wrote in his ruling.

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DeSantis is already appealing the ruling and the case is likely to be decided by the Florida supreme court, where he has appointed five of the seven justices. And the governor has his sights set on an even bigger goal – getting rid of the protection in the state constitution altogether. It’s an aggressive legal gambit that’s part of a broader conservative push in the courts to limit considerations of race in redistricting, even when it’s being used to protect voters of color.

“Even”? The word you want is “especially.”

While the Florida case is unique because it involves a state-based constitutional provision, it could have broader implications if it reaches the US supreme court, said Mark Gaber, the senior director of redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit group. The court could be forced to decide whether “the history of past discrimination makes it constitutional to prohibit the diminishment, the retrogression, of minority voting strength”, Gaber said. Its decision could affect a handful of other states that have implemented their own standards barring retrogression.

We must pretend that slavery and racism never happened starting NOW.