Race matters in Louisiana—but it matters just as much in other parts of the American South. Especially for Black Americans, race has never stopped mattering since the US was founded two and a half centuries ago. “It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance along with everybody else has not pledged allegiance to you,” the writer James Baldwin said in a debate six decades ago.
For the activist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the awakening came in 1941 when she was travelling by train in Louisiana.
Louisiana is in the news now because of a recent Supreme Court ruling (Louisiana v. Callais) that restricts a major provision of the Voting Rights Act, thereby allowing American states to speed up gerrymandering which will adversely affect not only Blacks but other people of colour as well.
In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, Congress also passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which has always held greater significance for immigrants. Indeed, the latter act changed America. The Voting Rights Act, on the other hand, was seen as relevant to Blacks in the South, where they’d suffered horrendously in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. But all minorities in the South may bear the brunt of this new Supreme Court ruling.
First, it’s important to point out how the lives of Black Americans and other people of colour are inextricably linked. This is particularly true in the South, where any laws affecting Blacks are bound to affect other minorities.
Moreover, immigrants of colour, no matter where they live in the country, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Southern Blacks.
The Immigration and Nationality Act wouldn’t have been passed if it hadn’t been for the landmark Civil Rights Act, which Congress passed in 1964 only after a long and valiant struggle for justice.
For Indians and others born outside the US, Trump 2.0’s aggressive initiatives on nonimmigrant and immigrant visas, OPT (Optional Practical Training), and birthright citizenship are deeply concerning. Rightly so. Nevertheless, they should also be aware that this Supreme Court ruling will reverberate for years in the South. And it's bound to have nationwide consequences.
Between 2020 and 2025, as the data-driven Visual Capitalist shows, the population increase was highest in the South (6.0%), far outpacing the West (1.9%), Midwest (1.1%), and Northeast (0.7%). Overall, the US population rose by 3.1% in the same period. As a result, the South is adding congressional seats at a faster rate than other regions. A key provision (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Acts stated that if a congressional map eroded the power of minority voters, courts could intervene, sometimes requiring the state to redraw the map so that minority voters had a good shot at electing the candidates they favored. This was meant to redress historic injustice.
Now, however, the Supreme Court ruling says that states cannot carve out districts with race as a determining factor, even if the intention is to help disadvantaged minorities.
Discrimination is still illegal, but because a lawsuit has to prove intentional discrimination based on race, challenging any state’s map becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Meanwhile, the redrawing of districts on the basis of party loyalty is legitimate. That, of course, is called gerrymandering, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.”
What it means, in effect, is that partisanship becomes a cover for race, letting the predominantly Republican-controlled Southern states carve out districts to the advantage of White supporters. Blacks and other racial minorities who don’t lean Republican will be left out in the cold in terms of congressional representation. It’s disingenuous to think ideology (and party loyalty) is not linked to race. The racial sorting that began in the1960s has accelerated in recent years. Back then, it was the civil rights legislation that triggered a mass exodus of Whites to the Republican Party, which capitalized on the so-called Southern Strategy to capture the White House. More recently, immigration and the nation’s growing diversity has played a role in this rightward shift.
In the 2024 election, according to the Brookings Institution, 84% of Trump voters were White. And as the Pew Research Center noted that year, “White voters make up 79% of Republicans and Republican leaners.” In the last election, it’s true that Trump made inroads with minorities, including Indian Americans. Issues like the economy and border control played a role. Now we see that support evaporating. Trump 2.0 is scaring away minorities, swiftly rather than slowly.
Some Indian Americans thought that aligning themselves with MAGA Republicans would insulate them from bigotry and exclusion. But in this eye-opening era, they have been—or should be—disabused of that notion. In the MAGA world, even allies are “othered” if they’re not seen as “real” or “true” Americans. James Baldwin’s powerful words continue to resonate.
In 1941, when Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s train crossed into Louisiana, a conductor told her to move from the “Whites only” section. Chattopadhyay, who had a valid ticket, refused to budge, angering the conductor. He walked away, only to return looking calmer. He’d found out that she was not a Black American. When he asked her where she was from, she merely said, “New York.” Not satisfied, the conductor insisted on knowing which country she was from.
“It makes no difference,” Chattopadhyay said. “I’m a coloured woman obviously and it is unnecessary for you to disturb me, for I have no intention of moving from here.”
The conductor, realizing that she was Asian, as he put it, left her alone for the rest of the journey.
“By refusing to move, Kamaladevi defied the legalised bigotry of the American South,” writes historian Nico Slate in a book titled Colored Cosmopolitanism, which examines “the shared struggle for freedom in the United States and India.”
This expression of solidarity is worth remembering as we live through another turbulent period.
(This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)