The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system | Carol Anderson

The court has approved or tolerated massive voter roll purges, extreme gerrymandering and election laws that have a disparate impact on minorities

The US supreme court, in a 5-4 decision, used the ruse that it was too close to an election - three months away - to scrap a racially discriminatory, Republican-drawn legislative map in Alabama. A lower court had previously ruled against the state because its gerrymandered congressional districts diluted the voting strength of African Americans by ensuring that 27% of Alabama's population would garner only 14% of the state's congressional representation. But that reality didn't faze five justices; the US supreme court was just fine with letting a policy designed to disfranchise Black voters unfurl and do its damage in an oncoming federal election.

The echoes of a brutal past are resonating in this decision.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. She is a contributor to the Guardian