The logic of the racist Supreme Court isn’t adding up
The logic of the racist Supreme Court isn’t adding up
最高法院的种族主义逻辑根本讲不通
The court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act disregards some obvious math. 法院对《投票权法案》的拆解无视了一些显而易见的数学逻辑。
Close watchers of the Supreme Court knew that the conservative supermajority was about to murder what was left of the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais took down Section 2 of the law, clearing the way for racist gerrymandering, because it is now racist to remedy racism. The decision is an affront to the history of the Voting Rights Act, an affront to the history of the United States, and an affront to math. 密切关注最高法院的人都知道，保守派的绝对多数即将扼杀《投票权法案》（Voting Rights Act）残存的生命。周三在“路易斯安那州诉卡莱斯案”（Louisiana v. Callais）中的裁决废除了该法案的第2条，为种族主义的选区划分扫清了障碍，因为现在“纠正种族主义”本身被视为种族主义。这一裁决是对《投票权法案》历史的侮辱，是对美国历史的侮辱，也是对数学的侮辱。
The state of Louisiana, which is around 30 percent Black, has six districts. The voting districts are drawn so that there are two majority-Black districts. That is two out of six districts; approximately 33 percent of the districts, you might say. Because SCOTUS has ruled this map unconstitutional, the state of Louisiana will almost certainly redraw the maps so there is only one majority-Black district. So a statewide population of 30 percent will now have their voting preferences reflected in 17 percent of the state’s districts. 路易斯安那州约有30%的黑人人口，拥有六个选区。目前的选区划分方案中，有两个以黑人为主的选区。这六个选区中有两个，也就是大约33%的比例。由于最高法院裁定该地图违宪，路易斯安那州几乎肯定会重新划分选区，使得以黑人为主的选区只剩下一个。这意味着，占全州人口30%的群体，其投票偏好现在只能在17%的选区中得到体现。
Theoretically, voting is more subtle than race. Many different things at municipal, state, and federal levels appear on any given ballot; no racial minority is a monolith, and a community will reflect a rich variety of social and political views. But possibly because modern-day Republicans are incapable of toning down the racism, around 83 percent of Black American voters identify as Democrats — this is especially understandable in Southern states like Louisiana, an insurrectionist state readmitted to the Union in 1868 after being forced to fix its bullshit by a civil war that killed somewhere around 750,000 Americans. 从理论上讲，投票比种族问题要微妙得多。任何一张选票上都涵盖了市政、州和联邦层面的诸多议题；没有任何一个少数族裔是铁板一块的，一个社区会反映出丰富多样的社会和政治观点。但也许是因为现代共和党人无法收敛其种族主义倾向，约83%的美国黑人选民认同民主党——这一点在路易斯安那州这样的南方州尤其可以理解。路易斯安那州曾是一个叛乱州，在经历了一场导致约75万人死亡的内战并被迫纠正其荒谬行径后，于1868年重新加入联邦。
The provisions of the Voting Rights Act addressing racial discrimination did not come about in a colorblind vacuum, because the history of the United States is not colorblind. The Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, VRA, affirmative action — all of these things are part of a long struggle to correct the broken math of our society. 33 percent is not the same as 30 percent, but it’s a damn sight closer to it than 17 is. The VRA’s Section 2 was part of a vast, interlocking project to get us closer to 1 = 1. 《投票权法案》中针对种族歧视的条款并非诞生于一个“色盲”的真空地带，因为美国历史本身就不是“色盲”的。内战、民权运动、投票权法案、平权行动——所有这些都是为了纠正我们社会中扭曲的数学逻辑而进行的长期斗争的一部分。33%虽然不等于30%，但它比17%要接近得多。《投票权法案》的第2条是一个宏大且环环相扣的工程的一部分，旨在让我们更接近“1=1”的公平目标。
From the signing of the Constitution, the math simply did not add up. States were given proportional electoral power based on their populations, but the same human beings that added numbers to the Electoral College were not eligible to vote. And in the slaveholding South, it got even worse — each enslaved Black American was counted as three-fifths of a person, and none of them were allowed to vote. But the founders figured things evened out since the composition of the Senate, which doesn’t reflect population at all, favored the non-slaveholding states. (Today, we are still held hostage by this miserable math, where 575,000 Wyomingites have the same number of Senate votes as 39 million Californians.) Even after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, racist-controlled Southern states kept designing systems like poll taxes, voting tests, and grandfather provisions to block the Black vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 took a heavy hand to these repeat offenders. 从宪法签署之日起，这笔账就根本算不平。各州根据人口获得相应的选举权，但那些为选举人团贡献了人口基数的人本身却无权投票。在蓄奴的南方，情况更糟——每个被奴役的美国黑人只被算作五分之三个“人”，且他们完全没有投票权。但开国元勋们认为，由于参议院的构成完全不反映人口比例，且偏向非蓄奴州，所以一切都“平衡”了。（时至今日，我们仍然被这种糟糕的数学逻辑所绑架：57.5万怀俄明州人的参议院投票权与3900万加州人相等。）即使在内战和重建修正案之后，受种族主义控制的南方各州仍不断设计人头税、投票测试和“祖父条款”等制度来阻挠黑人投票。1965年的《投票权法案》对这些惯犯采取了强硬手段。
The United States sees clear racial disparities in generational wealth, educational outcomes, average income, life expectancy, and infant mortality — disparities that are heightened by unequal representation in government. The Civil Rights Movement sought to fix these disparities on many fronts, tinkering with the interlocking systems that generated these bad numbers. The conservative backlash to civil rights was a bootlicking defense of the status quo — instead of updating a buggy system, they’d rather reinvent race science to keep things exactly the way they are. 美国在代际财富、教育成果、平均收入、预期寿命和婴儿死亡率方面存在明显的种族差异——而政府中不平等的代表权加剧了这些差异。民权运动试图在多个方面修复这些差异，通过修补那些产生这些糟糕数据的连锁系统来改善现状。保守派对民权运动的反扑是对现状的卑躬屈膝——他们宁愿重塑种族科学来维持现状，也不愿更新一个充满漏洞的系统。
For a brief window in time, a progressive SCOTUS was aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, building a body of case law that seemed to bend America’s moral arc toward justice. But then the court began to drift rightward. And in 1987, when confronted with statistical evidence that the death penalty was disparately applied by race, the court balked at math. In McCleskey v. Kemp, lawyers challenged the death penalty on the basis of a statistical study of 2,000 homicide cases in Georgia that showed a glaringly fucked-up pattern: 在一段短暂的时间里，进步派主导的最高法院曾与民权运动保持一致，建立了一系列似乎能将美国的道德弧线引向正义的判例法。但随后，法院开始向右转。1987年，当面对死刑在种族应用上存在差异的统计证据时，法院对数学望而却步。在“麦克莱斯基诉坎普案”（McCleskey v. Kemp）中，律师们基于对佐治亚州2000起凶杀案的统计研究对死刑提出了质疑，该研究显示了一种极其荒谬的模式：
Baldus found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70% of the cases involving black defendants and white victims; 32% of the cases involving white defendants and white victims; 15% of the cases involving black defendants and black victims; and 19% of the cases involving white defendants and black victims. 鲍尔德斯（Baldus）发现，在涉及黑人被告和白人受害者的案件中，检察官寻求死刑的比例为70%；涉及白人被告和白人受害者的案件为32%；涉及黑人被告和黑人受害者的案件为15%；而涉及白人被告和黑人受害者的案件为19%。
“Statistics, at most, may show only a likelihood that a particular factor entered into some decisions,” wrote the court at the time, unwilling to see the numbers for themselves. The math of disparate impact began to fall out of fashion in law; even as dictionary fetishists like Justice Antonin Scalia pantomimed objectivity by zooming in real hard on words, numbers were sidelined. “统计数据充其量只能显示某个特定因素可能影响了某些决策，”当时的法院写道，他们不愿正视这些数字。关于“不同影响”（disparate impact）的数学逻辑开始在法律界失宠；即使像安东宁·斯卡利亚（Antonin Scalia）大法官这样的“词典拜物教徒”通过死抠字眼来假装客观，数字却被边缘化了。
In 2017, when presented with statistical evidence of gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” His innumeracy might not be feigned — a Harvard history major, he’s made major arithmetic errors in public and has been baffled by diagrams in court. (“It looks pretty complicated. There are a lot of arrows,” he said of a software patent in oral arguments in Alice v. CLS.) But his truculent attitude toward numbers is convenient. 2017年，当面对威斯康星州选区划分不公的统计证据时，首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨（John Roberts）称其为“社会学胡言乱语”。他的数学无能可能并非装出来的——作为哈佛大学历史系毕业生，他曾在公开场合犯过严重的算术错误，并被法庭上的图表搞得晕头转向。（在“爱丽丝诉CLS案”的口头辩论中，谈到一项软件专利时，他说：“这看起来太复杂了，有很多箭头。”）但他对数字的这种粗暴态度，确实非常“方便”。