Who counts as Black in voting maps? Some GOP state officials want that narrowed

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Republican officials in Louisiana are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set a narrower definition of "Black" for redistricting that excludes some Black people and could minimize their voting power.

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Who counts as Black in voting maps? Some GOP state officials want that narrowed
Republican officials in Louisiana are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set a narrower definition of "Black" for redistricting that excludes some Black people and could minimize their voting power.
5:08 PM · Oct 22, 2022

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1126287827/redistricting-supreme-court-louisiana-black-african-american

Who counts as Black?

The thorny question has quietly found its way before the U.S. Supreme Court again, ensnared in a major legal battle over the Voting Rights Act that could further gut the landmark law and make it harder to protect the political power of voters of color.

The battle is playing out over new maps of congressional voting districts created by Republican-led legislatures in Alabama and Louisiana after the 2020 census. The fate of the maps rests on how the Supreme Court rules first in the case out of Alabama — Merrill v. Milligan — which the high court heard this month and may set a precedent for lawsuits about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

In both cases out of the Deep South states, lower courts have separately found that the maps were drawn in a way that likely dilutes Black voters' strength at the polls. That would violate the Voting Rights Act by giving a minority group, as spelled out in Section 2, "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice."

GOP state officials have pushed back against the analyses that led to those findings, partly by questioning a definition of Blackness that, for close to two decades, has been the standard in cases focused on the voting power of Black people and no other racial or ethnic group whom the federal government classifies as a protected minority population.

*snip*

[Samrob]

1. The real question is "Who is treated as Black?"

Obama's mother was white. His father was African. Obama was treated (considered, defamed, ridiculed, hated, loved, despised, admired) as a Black man. It's when 50-50 = 100%

[Hortensis]

2. SCOTUS could even use this to hold the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Ellis, the Marquette University Law School professor, warns that justices on the Supreme Court who may be inclined to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act might see the highlighting of alternative definitions of "Black" for redistricting as a "kind of manipulation of race that would reinforce their view that the Voting Rights Act ought to be held unconstitutional."

"That could be the worst case of the outcomes here," Ellis says.

Over 26% of Alabamians are black, and it's outrageously obvious that the Republican plot to pack most of them into one congressional district and break the rest up is among the other six is vote diluation and violates section 2. Instead, the high court could take the opportunity to further gut the VRA or even eliminate it and its protections altogether.