A Country at Twelve Percent
The Supreme Court has reinterpreted the Voting Rights Act into silence. What we are watching is not a technicality. It is a moral reckoning.
Twelve percent. That is the number that follows me out of Justice Elena Kagan's dissent in Louisiana v. Callais, decided on April 29, 2026, by a six-to-three majority that has now finished what Shelby County started. Twelve percent of Louisiana's white electorate, Kagan reminds us, will cross over to support a candidate preferred by Black voters in a statewide contest. Twelve out of every hundred. Eighty-eight who will not. This is not an abstraction. It is a number that lives in the bones of the South — in church basements and county clerks' offices, in the long, choreographed history of Black Louisianans organizing toward a representation that the Constitution has, on paper, promised them since 1868.
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Eulogizing My Father
There is an architecture to our sorrow, a heavy, physical weight that settles into the very bone. It does not ask for your permission; it simply demands your endurance. It has been a few months since I stood and delivered these words for my father—a season spent wandering in the valley of the shadow, trying to gather the necessary breath to release this tribute out into the world. I could not put these pages before you until the Lord saw fit to steady my hands. Grief is a brutal thief, and I have had to sit in the quiet with the ghost of his absence before I could speak on it again.
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The Unraveling of a Republic
Drawing on Cornel West's metaphor of Ahab from Moby Dick, Dean argues that the MAGA movement is on a nihilistic quest to dismantle American democracy through attacks on DEI, aggressive immigration policies, and the weaponization of misinformation. This democratic erosion is dangerously accelerated by a conservative Supreme Court that has stripped away judicial checks, a move that dissenting Justices Jackson and Sotomayor have called an existential threat to the rule of law. Ultimately, this text is an indictment of the American citizen, whose apathy allows the republic to founder, forgetting Benjamin Franklin's warning that it is a government they must actively work to keep.
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