Early this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him.

A new electoral map, passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate.

The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight.

To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following year by passing a new law specifically designed to keep the flag on the seal. The vote was 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate, with no Democrats voting in favor. Lee, who is from Williamson county, signed it.

The same statehouse that just folded Memphis Black voters into Williamson county is the one that legislated to preserve the Confederate flag of the county absorbing them. The cartography doesn’t require translation. Tennessee is being precise, and they aren’t alone.

This is the aftermath of the supreme court’s disastrous 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v Callais, decided less than a month ago, which gravely weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections for Black representation. Ever since, Republicans have resembled eager children on Christmas morning, tearing our electoral maps to shreds. Louisiana is set to eliminate one of its two Black-majority districts. The court let Alabama erase one of its two Black-majority districts before this fall’s primaries.

In Mississippi, the Republican state senator who chairs the Medicaid committee said this week that it was time to “erase Bennie Thompson’s district”.

Thompson is 78 years old. He is the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation in Washington, from a state where 38% of the population is Black. He is also the man who chaired the House investigation into January 6. Yet Tate Reeves, the governor, who proclaims April Confederate Heritage Month every year, recently vowed that Thompson’s “reign of terror” will be over soon.

Who, precisely, is terrified here? And of what, or whom?

Yvette Clarke, the chair of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC News recently that 19 of the caucus’s 62 members were at risk through the 2028 cycle. The US has gone from 13 Black members of Congress in 1971 to 62 today; almost a third of them are in jeopardy. As Hakeem Jeffries is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House, the ground is collapsing beneath Black officeholders across the south.

Representation without architecture is brittle. The presence of a Black speaker matters; but it cannot, by itself, prevent the unbuilding of the conditions that made the speakership reachable. What the Voting Rights Act produced – not just officeholders but the constituency-mapping that allowed Black political coalitions to cohere – is precisely what Republicans are now undoing.

They have a roadmap. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s administration resegregated the federal civil service that Reconstruction had pried open. They did it by executive action and administrative memo. Department by department, lunchroom by lunchroom. Wilson never issued a proclamation that named the project. The most consequential racial reordering of the early 20th century happened via paperwork.

Between 1900 and 1903, Black voting in Alabama fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000. The 1901 state constitution gave county registrars administrative discretion. White men could vote without anyone vouching for them. Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. After George Henry White left office in 1901, no Black American was elected to Congress until 1928.

That collapse was a procedure. The architects did not call it apartheid. They called it “states’ rights”. They called it reform.

Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld segregation, outlasted, by 58 years, the presidents who appointed the justices who decided it. The Jim Crow settlement, built between 1877 and 1896, held for nearly nine decades. These are lifetimes. The architects of that settlement were not building for a midterm. Theirs was a generational project, and they succeeded.

The price of disobedience is rising. Last week, the speaker of the Tennessee house of representatives, Cameron Sexton, sent a letter to the Democratic leader, Karen Camper, stripping members of the house Democratic caucus of their committee assignments. The alleged offenses, in his own listing: interlocking arms in the well of the House. Blocking aisles. Distributing earplugs to a colleague. A speaker of a state legislature stripped legislators of their committee assignments, in part, for the distribution of earplugs. Other red states will surely recognize the template; some will use it themselves.

Yet while Tennessee was carving up Memphis, Democratic party stalwarts – including Pete Buttigieg, Elissa Slotkin and Barack Obama – were in Toronto at the Global Progress Action Summit, gathering to learn affordability messaging from Mark Carney. How do we fight the authoritarian right? The president of the Center for American Progress asked from the stage. The answer offered was to message better on groceries, move slightly to the right on immigration, build housing faster.

There is nothing wrong with affordability politics – but it will not save us, or our electoral maps, from a Republican party that would rather decimate representation than persuade voters. There is more at stake here than our grocery bills. America has its own version of the structure other countries call apartheid. Ours is older. Ours is Jim Crow. Republicans are adapting it for a new age. By the time the next census is conducted, it will be conducted under these rules. By the time a Democratic president takes office, the federal courts adjudicating that president’s executive orders will have been shaped by a decade of Republican appointments.

It is tempting to believe that November can return the country to a sort of racial status quo that existed before Trump’s political ascendancy. Frankly, even that America was never what it claimed to be. But rather than bringing the nation closer to becoming a free republic worthy of the name, Republicans are dragging it backward, again.

Saying so is not despair. It is where the fight begins. You cannot resist what you refuse to name, and you cannot outlast what you have decided is temporary.

• Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist