Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
“Mr. Oommen, why are all the white people bad?”
A 7-year-old asked me that 20 years ago, during a lesson on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks as part of a unit called “Helpers of Humanity.” The unit was meant to offer students role models worth emulating.
It was an honest question — and it exposed something I had gotten wrong.
In trying to teach about racial injustice, I had told a story where harm was visible, but possibility was not. A unit meant to highlight moral courage had, instead, left this child without a clear path to becoming a helper in that story.
So I went back and revisited the story, finding what had been left out: the fuller truth. Black organizers who carried the movement. White allies who stood in solidarity, sometimes at real cost.
What that student was asking was, “What is possible for me within this story?”
That question feels sharper now as the news unfolds.
On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map — one designed to create a second majority-Black district. The ruling significantly narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge discriminatory maps. Supporters framed it as a return to fairness. But that framing hinges on not naming power and a false sense of victimhood.
Race in the United States has never just been about identity. It has been about power: Who holds it, how it is structured and how it persists. The Voting Rights Act attempted to interrupt those patterns. For decades, courts interpreted Section 2 to address not only explicit discrimination, but also how district lines could dilute minority voting strength. The Callais decision raises the bar — requiring closer evidence of intentional discrimination — making it harder to challenge maps that produce unequal outcomes.
This is how power maintains itself — crafting rules that make discrimination hard to prove, and shaping which injustices law recognizes or ignores. By rejecting the Louisiana map, the Supreme Court helps sustain the power structures that district maps can uphold. That is not neutrality. It is a shift in how power is protected.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the Voting Rights Act as one of the most consequential achievements of the civil rights movement because it acknowledged that the playing field was not level — and acted accordingly.
Students are being asked to accept that efforts to account for race are themselves suspect, while the root systems of inequity remain buried and undisturbed — distorting their understanding of power and justice.
In classrooms across the Pacific Northwest and our nation, that contradiction is not abstract.
We ask students to examine history honestly, to understand systems and to ask why inequities persist. Then they encounter a public narrative that suggests those inequities can be addressed without naming the power that produced them.
Students notice.
They see when “fairness” is defined without context. They sense when stories leave out how systems are maintained. And they understand where they are positioned — whether they are invited into the work of democracy or distanced from it.
As a brown male educator in the Eugene-Springfield area, I often return to the idea of identity safety: the conditions under which people can participate fully without having to defend or diminish who they are. Schools try, imperfectly, to create those conditions. But they are shaped by the messages coming from beyond the classroom.
So, yes, the anger is palpable.
Not simply because power exists, but because of how it is maintained, and how often that maintenance is obscured, even in the lessons we teach.
And because I think about that 7-year-old.
I think about what it means for a child to enter a unit called “Helpers of Humanity” and leave without a clear sense of how they, too, might help — what it means when the horizon of possibility narrows before they fully understand the question they are asking.
We owe them something better.
We owe them the truth: that systems can be unequal, that power can be named and that it can be challenged, that history is not only a record of harm, but also of people choosing, again and again, to act differently.
Because the real question that the student was asking was never just about blame.
It was about possibility.
What is possible for me in this story? Who can I choose to become?
The answers we offer — through our laws, our teaching and our willingness to name power honestly — will shape what democracy becomes.
