RIP Voting Rights Act| The Cameron Journal Newsletter
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Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter. Each week, Cameron Lee Cowan wraps up the headlines with commentary, helping you navigate today’s media narratives, how they are affecting our Culture, Lifestyle, and Society.
Update from Cameron
Welcome to May everyone! April evaporated. When I was a kid, April always seemed to be the longest month because my birthday was at the end of it, but as an adult, April evaporates, and this past April definitely went right through, and my birthday weekend last weekend was a brief respite, and we’re already in May. The year is almost half done, and it seems like the year just turned over. And that also means we have the midterm elections coming up, and there’s already drama with that because of the whole Graham Platner, Nazi SS tattoo thing up in Maine. My mind is reeling from all of this.
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The News Narrative of the Week
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour
Sorry for only one story this week, I got a little busy with the salon! See you Thursday!
SCOTUS Killed the Voting Rights Act
“We’re finally getting rid of this racist bullshit.”
That’s one of the first things I heard about this landmark decision this week from the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Calais which has gutted a central tenet of the 1964 Voting Rights Act which restricted how districts and other electoral decisions could be made, especially in southern states with large black populations. Before the VRA, white politicians (who were at that time Democrats before realignment so don’t mention it) would make sure that large populations of black voters (those who weren’t disenfranchised) couldn’t elect one of their own in any district by drawing the district boundaries for congress and state races in such a way that black voters were spread across many districts in order to make sure that black voting power was divided in such a way that a white candidate would come out on top. The VRA stopped this from happening, and the federal government supervised the districts in southern states to stop this. This week, Louisiana managed to get a decision that guts this key decision, similarly to how SCOTUS gutted the VRA 8 years ago by removing federal oversight over elections and electoral policies in the South to prevent racist policies from quietly being passed along that would disenfranchise black voters. Until the VRA, a state like Mississippi, which had a majority of black residents, hadn’t had a black representative in Congress since Reconstruction.
The world of the Civil Rights movement is slowly being undone. Now, you might be asking, “Hey Cameron, isn’t this all racist against white people? To which I will retort, it’s not racist against white people because you can be prejudiced against a dominant group, but you can’t be racist against them because they control the structure of the system. The South worked very hard to make sure black people did not have full franchise between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. They did this through districts, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the only thing I have to say is thank god poll taxes and literacy tests are unconstitutional now, otherwise they would try to bring that back too.
From the article in the New York Times: “Consider the effect in Louisiana. That state had no Black representation in Congress for more than a century after Reconstruction ended, and finally elected its first Black member in 1990. A second Black member served from 1993 to 1997. In 2001, Louisiana redrew its map to revert to only one majority-Black congressional district out of six, in a state where the Black population is now about one-third of the total. This case began in 2022, when the state had only one Black member of Congress, and a group of Black voters sued over the state’s map. The plaintiffs won in the lower courts, based on extensive evidence of racially polarized voting, and Louisiana then redrew its map in 2024 to include two majority-Black congressional districts.”
Obviously, things are less contentious than before, but in a country where African-Americans represent 13% of the national population, any reduction in seats in Congress already represents a destruction of say in national political life. It’ll be worse at the state level. Believe it or not, these things are important because they represent systemic and structural barriers to fair representation in a system that already has structural fairness problems (first-past-the-post, or winner-takes-all). SCOTUS reset the standard for what constitutes racist intent and made it impossible to prove. Florida has already announced new maps, and 2 other states are already looking to stop their primaries, draw new districts, and run the primaries again.
Much like before, this is another way in which certain people are being systematically shut out of the national political discussion.
Articles of Interest
https://www.cameronjournal.com/why-pdf-files-still-dominate-digital-workflows-in-2026/
https://www.cameronjournal.com/the-evolution-of-health-tech-and-business/
Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast and The Living Joke
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The Cameron Journal Newshour:
The Living Joke:
The World is Hard, This is Not
If you’re new here, my name is Cameron Lee Cowan M.A. MFA, and I’m the Creative Director here at The Cameron Journal. You can learn more about me on the about page. I do research and commentary on politics, culture, and the world around us.
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Remember, The World is hard; this is Not.