SAN DIEGO — Allow me to insert some lawyer language.

Henceforth, the Supreme Court should avoid clumsily manhandling cases that involve the thorny topic of race.

Why? Because at least six Justices — those who are ideologically conservative and who were nominated to the High Court by Republican presidents — seem to have a limited understanding of the subject matter.

The conservative majority displayed their ignorance again when — in deciding a case called Louisiana v. Callais — they struck down a voting district map in the Bayou State that appears to have been drawn explicitly along racial lines in order to lump together as many Black voters as possible.

That practice is forbidden under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

I'm sorry, you lost me. Or, I guess, I lost myself.

In this scenario, who is being denied "equal protection" of the law? White voters? How so? Are their votes diluted? The opposite seems true.

In Louisiana, African-Americans represent about one-third of the state's population. Yet, until recently, only one of the state's six congressional districts was a majority-Black district. Legislators tried to remedy that by creating another district — the same district that has now been struck down. By shoving Black voters into two districts (that presumably vote Democratic), legislators all but ensured that the remaining four districts would be majority White (and presumably vote Republican).

Just checking. Four is still more than two, right?

Even so, in the redistricting process, you can see where state legislators might get confused. After all, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — through Section 2 — allows states to consider race to some degree when redistricting in order to ensure that racial minority groups can elect representatives who understand their interests.

As is often the case, where race is concerned, the law sends mixed messages that tend to create a thick fog. For instance, in college admissions, the Supreme Court for more than 40 years told institutions of higher learning that they could consider the race or ethnicity of applicants as one factor among many, just not to the point where they created a hard quota.

Ironically, those who don't understand race include Clarence Thomas, an African-American who seethes with anger over how he has been treated by white people — specifically, white liberals. The rest of the right-wing posse — e.g., John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — spent their careers encased within protective bubbles of white privilege.

All six conservative Justices went to elite law schools. Roberts and Gorsuch attended Harvard Law School. Alito and Kavanaugh went to Yale Law School. Barrett attended Notre Dame Law School.

Still, besides their legal training, it would really have been helpful for them to have taken a course or two in U.S. history.

Between the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which gave freed slaves the right to vote, and the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, southern whites in a number of states worked diligently to make sure they didn't lose ground politically to southern Blacks. To maintain power, whites in the South used threats, trickery, violence and deviousness to dissuade Black people from voting. They dreamt up the poll tax, literacy tests, even "grandfather clauses" that granted the right to vote only to those whose grandfathers had also cast ballots many years before.

It was because of this foolishness that there needed to be a Voting Rights Act in the first place. The intent was never to disenfranchise white people. It was to stop white people from disenfranchising Black people.

You don't pick up on any of that in the majority decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was written by Alito. His view is that it's time to scrap Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and put an end to racial redistricting once and for all — unless proponents can point to a specific instance of discrimination. Which, by the way, Alito doesn't think will happen because he believes that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

Strangely enough, that very phrasing sounds discriminatory — not to mention hostile, dismissive and clueless about what it is like to go through life in the United States as a person of color.

Alito was out of line. It's not up to white people to decide when racial remedies have run their course and need to be scrapped. When they have the audacity to try to make that call, all they succeed in doing is showing why these kinds of remedies are still necessary.

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Michael Dziedzic at Unsplash