During oral arguments for the case conservatives hope will overturn key enforcement sections of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts asked if the South was more racist than the North.  This, along with Scalia’s racial entitlement idiocy, shows how completely out of touch a bunch of elite old white men can be.

The South still has a much bigger problem with racism than the North.  That things are infinitely better in the South than they were in the mid 1900s there can be no doubt.  But to think that all the problems that the Voting Rights Act was enacted to prevent have been solved takes a willful disregard to both history and the human condition.

The Great Migration was a mass exodus of blacks from the South to places North and West.  The reasons for it are many and varied, but it can be boiled down to institutional racism.  It happened in fits and starts from the 1910s to the 1970s.  When it was over, around 11 million blacks had left the South.

Think about that.  The Great Migration didn’t end until the early 1970s.  Jim Crow laws were passed as late as 1965.  Lynchings occurred as late as 1964.

This all ended just before I was born.  Many of the people who are responsible for the conditions that caused institutional racism are still alive.  Their children, who were fed that hate on a daily basis are still in power.  Every single person on the bench of the Supreme Court is old enough to remember schools being desegregated.  All of this history is their history.

How quickly history can be forgotten.