NC’s new maps may be ‘race blind,’ but they still hurt minority voters

North Carolina Republicans say they’re taking a new approach to redistricting — but the maps they’re proposing have the same old problem.

After having to redraw maps multiple times in the past decade due to unconstitutional racial and partisan gerrymandering, Republican lawmakers have pledged not to use racial or partisan data this time around. But this “race-blind” approach to redistricting is problematic in itself, and it risks disenfranchising Black and brown voters once again.

Republicans say that using race in any way could open them up to legal challenges and accusations of gerrymandering, claiming that the courts have said there’s no need to pay attention to racial data in redistricting.

“It’s truly a conundrum and has been for the last decade for the GOP, because when we look at race, we were told we shouldn’t have, and those maps were struck down,” Republican Sen. Paul Newton, co-chair of the Senate redistricting committee, told the Associated Press. “Now that we’re not looking at race, the Democrat Party is telling us, ‘Oh, you should be looking at race.’”

But it’s really not much of a conundrum at all. It’s disingenuous for Republicans to pretend that using race in any way is wrong, when the courts have ruled that race can and should be used if it’s to ensure that all communities are represented fairly. The law is clear: racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional. But the consideration of race is permitted, and even required, under court interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. In states with racially polarized voting, mapmakers are required to create majority-minority districts so that those voters have an equal opportunity to vote and elect their candidate of choice. (Republicans say there’s no evidence of racially polarized voting in North Carolina, but they’ve also refused to study it.)

The true conundrum is how Republicans can say their maps are fair if they aren’t considering race at all.

“I’d love for the social construct of race to not be considered for anything, but that’s just not how it is,” Aimy Steele, executive director of the New North Carolina Project, said. “Everyone would have had to start off on an equal playing field for that to occur. And that hasn’t happened since the beginning of the United States. So knowing that, race has to be a factor.”

Ignoring race altogether isn’t much better than using it to target minority voters, as the courts said Republicans did when drawing the maps in 2011. Intentional or not, the effect is much the same: it dilutes the power of Black and brown voters. And, conveniently enough for Republicans, it also makes it harder for Democrats to get elected.

Under at least one map proposal, North Carolina’s two majority-minority districts — District 1 and District 12 — could become majority-white, and, as it happens, more competitive for Republicans. That would make all 14 congressional districts in North Carolina majority-white, even as the state is becoming notably more racially and ethnically diverse.

Other draft maps propose splitting the state’s most populous counties — Wake, Mecklenburg and Guilford — into as many as three or four congressional districts. These counties also happen to be Democratic strongholds with significant minority populations. Dividing them up effectively prevents those groups from achieving a majority in any one district.

“I really am very concerned about this notion that ‘everyone’s vote counts the same,’ because when you feel as a legislator that you have to chop up a major urban center four times for four different U.S. House districts, then you know that it’s because they’re afraid that one group will actually have a voice in an election,” Steele said.

Lawmakers say they want fair maps, but history has shown us otherwise. We’ve seen a lot of unfair map-making in North Carolina, regardless of what party is in power, and there’s a real chance that this round of redistricting could once again result in a drawn-out legal battle. That’s a lot of resources wasted defending something that could — and should — have been done right the first time.

In a state where Republicans fall behind in the number of registered voters, the only way they can maintain a safe majority is by gaming the system. Don’t be fooled: their race-blind approach has little to do with fairness and more to do with holding on to power.