Jim Crow, an authoritarian system of racial apartheid, was thought to be long buried in the past. But after a yearslong effort from the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a 21st-century version of state-sanctioned subjugation has emerged: Jim Crow 2.0.
This rebirth of one of America’s most draconian eras was accelerated in April after the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a landmark decision nullifying the requirement for majority-minority districts. States, counties and cities no longer bear any legal obligation to afford meaningful political representation to their Black constituents.
As with the original Jim Crow, Jim Crow 2.0 is a decentralized system in which states and municipalities are given free rein to subjugate various classes of people with no worry of outside intervention.
You can see this within the old Jim Crow order. To maximize their power, Southern states politically dominated by avowed white supremacists modeled policies after each other to create systems to segregate and strip Black residents of their voting power.
Under Jim Crow 2.0, Tennessee is the ultimate model for how to effectively create a permanent underclass — one disproportionately Black, with little to no chance of upward economic mobility.