Of Course the South’s Redistricting Rush Isn’t ‘Race-Neutral’

Until South Carolina tapped the brakes on the redistricting rush on Tuesday, it seemed that throughout much of the old Confederacy, the Republican Party had decided it was finished with representative democracy. Within hours of the US Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, southern states lined up to erase decades-old congressional districts that had given voice to minority communities.

To be clear, the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw districts to give voters a chance to be represented by someone of their own race; it was designed to protect the right for racial minorities to elect whomever they want to office. And that’s the principle the gerrymandering wars are undermining.