Supreme Court will weigh in on new mostly Black Louisiana congressional district, after election
Supreme Court will weigh in on new mostly Black Louisiana congressional district, after election
The Supreme Court is taking up a new redistricting case involving Louisiana’s congressional map with two mostly Black districts.
Hey cool, while you're at it, look at the predominantly white districts too!
Predominantly black would indicate whoever drew the districts was trying to suppress the pull of the black population, no?
In this case the article describes the opposite. There was one predominantly black district (out of six, and 1/3 the population are black) that the state was forced essentially forced to split in two. In the article I think they even mention civil rights groups prefer the two districts.
There are two ways of fucking with district maps. The one you are thinking of is "packing," which puts as many voters as possible in one district. Another is "cracking," which spreads a large number of voters (who could win their own district-sized contest) across several other districts. This contested map seems to be undoing a "cracking."
The goal of election map fuckery is to have districts that are all either 100% or 49% opponents, that takes both packing and cracking to make it happen.
This is a good example of why redistricting is hard. Is it fair to intentionally distort things to make majority minority districts? Is it actually distorting to have no majority minority districts? Is discrimination ok when used for what's believed to be positive, or is the act of discrimination always bad? There's also the fairly racist assumption that the only chance a minority candidate has is in a majority minority district.
There also the weird idiosyncrasy where a handful of states were justifiably labeled as extra racist and deserve extra scrutiny. There isn't a way to add or remove state from the list though. This has allowed states not on the list to become just as or more racist and not be subjected to scrutiny.