John Roberts’ whites-only childhood and the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling.

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While John Lewis was beaten in Selma, while Freedom Riders died registering voters in Mississippi, and while President Lyndon Johnson muscled the Voting Rights Act through Congress, the boy who would grow up to eviscerate it rode bikes through tree-lined streets steps from the shore and was cosseted in private schools in a town built for white residents only.

Now that Chief Justice John Roberts has completed his decadeslong effort to undo the most successful civil rights legislation in American history, a simple question remains: Why? Is he a racist? What would lead a privileged graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School to dedicate so much of his life’s work to rolling back the victories of the Civil Rights Movement?

Maybe it’s as simple as this: Roberts was raised in the 1960s amid lily-white affluence in a tiny Indiana beach town where property deeds long forbade selling homes to Black or Jewish people. As a kid, he spent little time around Black people. From childhood to adulthood, he never lived anywhere, or close to anyone, who compelled him to feel empathy for the reality that experiencing freedom, like voting, wasn’t as easy for some Americans as it was for him. The chief justice has seemingly worn blinders for life.

Roberts was also a determined striver. For him, an education was always about getting the best job. This combination of isolation and ambition appears to have made him ready to embrace a trendy revanchist argument in early 1970s Republican circles: Any effort to combat racial discrimination was itself racial discrimination. The rising legal right wing battled civil rights by conjuring, and defending, a colorblind, race-neutral Constitution despite the country’s continuing struggle against anti-Black racism. It posited an America that never existed in place of the one that does.

Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when this idea was nothing but the sound of calculated white resentment, a well-off young man willing to embrace such a grievance could find the doors of power swinging open wide. Thanks to Roberts, this benighted nonsense is now the law of the land.

Any effort to understand Roberts’ dangerous combination of doggedness and blithe indifference must begin in ritzy Long Beach, Indiana, a wealthy enclave on the shores of Lake Michigan, home to some of the Chicago area’s wealthiest executives. His father, who helped manage the new Burns Harbor plant for Bethlehem Steel, chose to move his family half an hour northeast along the dunes rather than west where more Black Midwesterners lived. Deep into the 20th century, Long Beach advertised itself as a vacationland within a “highly restricted home community” where “all residents are Caucasian gentiles.”

During his 2005 confirmation hearings to become chief justice, Roberts described an idyllic heartland childhood lifted from a John Cougar Mellencamp song, all “endless fields” that were “punctuated by an isolated silo or a barn.” That was the same day Roberts unveiled another bit of brilliant PR, claiming that he would be a humble judge, comparing the job with that of a baseball umpire. A young man from Indiana could really go places if he appeared right out of central casting and could rebrand colorblind racism as just calling balls and strikes.

Maybe Roberts glimpsed farmland from the back seat on a drive to his exclusive prep school, but he wouldn’t have seen a barn or a John Deere combine next door to his parents’ lovely five-bedroom mock-Tudor home. There were no silos at La Lumiere, the private Catholic high school Roberts attended, an enclave within an enclave, located on a former lakefront estate. That institution was established in the early 1960s, just after the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, began insisting on the enforcement of the desegregation mandate of Brown v. Board. There would be no Black students at La Lumiere until 1970, just three years before Roberts graduated. “No one ever called me the N-word,” one Black alum, Paris Barclay (a classmate of Roberts’ who went on to direct the TV series Sons of Anarchy), told the Los Angeles Times. “They were a little too sophisticated for that.”

While the nation tore itself apart over civil rights and Vietnam, Roberts studied Latin and played football in a high school class of 20, working special summer jobs at Bethlehem reserved for the sons of executives that paid between $12 and $16 an hour, the equivalent of $88 to $117 an hour today. Then, at Harvard, he seemed to sidestep the debates over Roe v. Wade—although the Harvard Law Review on which Roberts worked included an article about Philip Kurland’s then-outlier claim that Richard Nixon should have been immune from prosecution for the crimes of Watergate, another position Roberts would make the law of the land when given the chance in response to the degradations of another criminal president five decades later.

Some fellow students knew Roberts’ politics but insisted that he didn’t engage in debates about these momentous battles. “He really was very good at being thoughtful and careful and not particularly conspicuous,” said Laurence Tribe, who taught Roberts constitutional law at Harvard. “He was very lawyerly, even as a law student.”

This was the moment, however, when right-wing legal circles hit upon a way to translate white resentment over affirmative action in higher education and against the landmark Voting Rights Act—little more than a decade old—into a more genteel critique over the fairness of special preferences for anyone. This strategy embraced the words of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson—“The law takes man as man and has no regard for his color”—but twisted those words to produce the opposite result.

In courtrooms, this played out in the form of trying to block consideration of the racial effects of a policy rather than focusing solely on proving an invidious racist intent. And by forcing advocates to prove something much harder—to see into a person’s heart rather than the real-life results of an action or law—the right-wing legal movement worked to apply the brakes to meaningful redress of policies that discriminated against Black people.

These efforts were prominent during Roberts’ years at Harvard. In 1976, during the summer of his college graduation, the Supreme Court, helmed by Nixon appointee Warren Burger, found in Washington v. Davis that D.C.’s police officer test—which measured standards of little relevance to the job but which was failed by Black applicants at a higher rate than white applicants—was perfectly constitutional and race-neutral.

Then, in 1978, while Roberts was in law school, in a 5–4 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Burger court narrowly approved affirmative action in college admissions by shifting it from an effort to help the historically disadvantaged gain some measure of redress and justice to one designed to improve white institutions through the introduction of racial diversity.

Tribe said that these issues “no doubt were very much in the air” when Roberts was at Harvard Law. Yet he says he still struggles to understand how Roberts could confuse the difference from using race to segregate with using it to integrate. “I only wish I had a plausible explanation,” he said.

Soon after law school, Roberts took a prestigious job at the Supreme Court, working for the most right-wing justice there: William Rehnquist, who would later be appointed chief justice. Between 1958 and 1964, Rehnquist had led a brigade of white Arizona Republicans in a project called Operation Eagle Eye, which used “voter caging” tactics to harass and intimidate minority voters at the polls. But as a Nixon appointee to the nation’s highest court, Rehnquist had changed his tactics and gussied up his once explicit racism in the fancy new duds of colorblindness, the same approach he had advised Barry Goldwater to take to justify voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during his failed presidential campaign. Rehnquist’s chambers, Ari Berman noted, “functioned as a federalist society before there was a Federalist Society,” as the justice and his clerks hammered out “states’ rights” positions that were proxies for defending racist policies. “Rehnquist reinforced John’s preexisting philosophies,” said Paul Smith, now a prominent liberal Supreme Court litigator who clerked that same year for Justice Lewis Powell. “John was not a believer in the courts giving rights to minorities and the downtrodden.”

Roberts leveraged the connections from his clerkship into a job in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice, submitting his application on Supreme Court letterhead and dropping Rehnquist’s name as a reference. Rehnquist himself called Ken Starr, the new chief of staff for the new attorney general, to help get Roberts hired as a special assistant to the AG. At the DOJ, Roberts would join a young crew of future master litigators, justices, and movement builders inside the Reagan administration, including Starr—who would later be the special prosecutor of Democratic President Bill Clinton—and Samuel Alito, who would later join Roberts on the Supreme Court.

Roberts, scarcely beyond his mid-20s, having never lived anywhere other than Indiana, Cambridge, and his fancy summer jobs, was handed the voting rights portfolio, even though he had zero experience working on voting rights issues. He had staged for a justice hostile to Black voting, who had joined an opinion of the Burger court limiting the reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to intent—a ruling Congress was working to undo as Roberts was clerking across First Street for Rehnquist. That was the battle Roberts was tasked to staff and helm for the right-wing Republicans: the war over questions of “intent” vs. “effect” during the 1980–82 congressional effort to reauthorize the act.

Congress was determined to overturn the court’s ruling in that case, Mobile v. Bolden, which had struck a severe blow to the Carter administration’s ability to enforce the VRA. By blocking the use of racially disparate effects of election changes and requiring proof of racist intent, the decision had shut down virtually all VRA enforcement. This was hardly colorblind or race-neutral. It devastated the act. The new DOJ brigade wanted it to stay that way. Civil rights activists, Democrats, and some moderate Republicans aimed to make it clear that Congress supported the effects test as proof of VRA violations.

Roberts, according to his friend and DOJ colleague Bruce Fein, led the way. He fought determinedly for months but lost decisively in Congress. Ultimately, Reagan signed a reauthorized VRA, overturning Bolden by embracing the effects test for Section 2 and extending the legislation’s preclearance requirements in Sections 4 and 5 to 2007. The act would be reauthorized again by Congress, nearly unanimously and a year early, in 2006 for another 25 years, through the early 2030s.

But Roberts played the long game. He never yielded. And in the meantime, with substantial investment by “conservative” and libertarian demi-billionaires and billionaires, leaders in the right-wing legal movement realized that they could achieve their goals more easily by capturing the Supreme Court than by winning public opinion and controlling Congress.

By 2005–06, Roberts and Alito were seated on the highest court in the land. And slowly, this blinkered insistence on a colorblind Constitution—in defiance of an America that was anything but colorblind and over anti-Black racism—would take hold.

In 2007, after Louisville and Seattle worked to voluntarily desegregate public schools, for example, Roberts said no, effectively rewriting decades of equal protection law in the process. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he declared in a simplistic tautology, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Then, in 2013, he would take his first crack at the Voting Rights Act, freezing the Section 5 preclearance formula and snuffing out its most important enforcement mechanism. Here, Roberts discarded the nearly unanimous work of Congress anchoring it to his personal declaration of racial progress and simply refused to engage with a more-than-12,000-page report that detailed a litany of modern-day voting rights abuses that would dilute or inhibit Black voters.

The federal judge who wrote the lower-court decision in Shelby County summarized example after example in his decision, reeling off stories of canceled elections, precincts shifted at the last moment, voting halls relocated to buildings that had been the sites of racial violence. Judge David Tatel did this, he said, because he had no faith that Roberts would read the congressional report himself or know any of this otherwise. Tatel is legally blind and seemingly feared that the justice would act with factual blindness. He was horribly, sadly, right.

Roberts, instead, pushed his own theories—and created his own supposed doctrine—even over the basic facts with which the case began. Shelby County started when white officials in Calera, Alabama, redistricted the only Black council member’s seat without bothering to preclear the map. The Bush Department of Justice used Section 5 to require a new election on the constitutionality map. Yet Roberts looked at this situation and saw not that Section 5 continued to work, but that things had changed sufficiently that it was no longer needed. The justice bent the law to meet his will, even though the Supreme Court is supposed to defer to the factual findings of lower-court judges unless those findings are clearly erroneous.

Now, with the edict in Callais, the Republican appointees to the Roberts court have effectively won the fight that Roberts decisively lost in 1982, scribbling over Section 2 to install the intent test that Congress after Congress brushed aside. And just as the days after Shelby County made Roberts’ folly clear—when states rushed to enact new barriers to the ballot box as soon as they were freed from preclearance—Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and other legislatures are currently rushing to draw new maps that erase minority-majority districts and replace them with lines favoring white Republicans.

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As those GOP legislators ripped up Black districts, and the Roberts court’s hyperpartisan ruling faces a growing backlash, Roberts now has the audacity to give speeches claiming that it is wrong to view justices as “political actors.”

The young man who grew up in a town made safe for whites only, who attended an almost entirely white private high school, has helped birth an illegitimate ruling that will significantly bleach out Congress. And the young man who learned the power of race neutrality in part from a Supreme Court justice who personally tried to intimidate Black voters has helped dress this faux–intellectual theory into legalese that has destroyed the legislation that had finally brought the promise of a thriving multiracial democracy into view, with growing representation of Black Americans.

Back in 2005, when Roberts rhapsodized about Indiana farmland and an endless horizon punctuated only by silos and barns, he was substituting a humble, real-life Midwest upbringing for his own. This mythic America is not where he actually grew up, but the whites-only town with the whites-only country club he golfed at is where his vision seems to still begin and end.

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