Now, Fausset asks, “Has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?” Fascinating! The hate and discrimination previously demonstrated by lynchings, church burnings, active obstruction of efforts by black citizens to vote and open declarations by state officials that blacks are inferior to whites haven’t been alleviated, they are just better “disguised”and “subtle.”

If I hadn’t featured the “Murder by Death” clip so recently, I would post it again here.

How does one subtly indicate the same level of racism as is demonstrated by church burnings and lynchings? Easy answer: one can’t. I expected the writer to deliver on his bizarre hypothesis, or at least make a heroic attempt. Nope. Instead we got…

• A quote from  a black civil rights lawyer in Georgia and a past president of the Georgia NAACP, asserting that subtler discriminatory forces have “gotten into the system and corroded the arteries of the system,” and will require particularly nuanced legal challenges to “ferret out.” His evidence for that position? None.
• ‘Some Black Southerners still feel that kind of racism deeply.” Well, since the mainstream media and Democrats keep insisting “that kind of racism” is pervasive, no wonder they “feel” that way.
• A Georgetown Law professor who points to a single 1987  death penalty case and a 1986 SCOTUS decision on jury selection.
• Statistics showing that black voting in Presidential had declined since Barack Obama was President. (Gee, how could that be?)
• The fact that the Supreme Court finally struck down affirmative action in college admissions as discriminatory (which it is by definition).
• The efforts by the Trump Administration to eliminate DEI programs, which are also discriminatory.

Amazingly, that’s it. That is the best the New York Times could muster to rebut Justice Alito’s majority opinion that the South has come a long way since 1965, too long a way to still treat it as an ongoing threat to black Americans’ access to the ballot box, and too long to regard most of the Voting Rights Act as fair and just in 2026.

The Left still maintains that racial discrimination by whites against blacks (that’s bad discrimination, while discrimination against white Americans is good discrimination) is a perpetual cultural norm, and claims this for two reasons. One is confirmation bias, and the other is that they want this to be true, indeed need it to be true. Justice Kagan, in her almost law-free dissent, wrote that trying to find smoking-gun evidence of racist motives in redistricting laws is “well-nigh impossible.” Her solution, and that of her ideological allies, is to assume racial prejudice without evidence.