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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.

I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.

I'm pretty certain that there would be no gerrymandering with racial side-effects today if different races had roughly similar partisan makeups.

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>I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.

You are free to think that. You need to remember, though - Alabama only had its first black representative in 1992, and that only happened because of a lawsuit reorganizing districts. In a non-racist system this would be a surprise because the black population is over 1/4th of the state and is geographically compact.

Either way, the effect of the districting is to dilute the voting power of the black population in favor of the white population. That's not legal to do, for good reason; states in the 20th century masked racial gerrymandering to hide their intent. See City of Mobile.

Alabama is particularly egregious, and we, as a society, should keep trying to fix that, but does that mean California and New York should try to do the opposite to cancel it out? No, that would be wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say...

I think systems that fix racial inequality and lack of opportunity are generally good but agree that where they verge into potentially discriminatory themselves we need to be very careful with them and design them in a manner that prevents them from deviating from their purpose and allows us to remove them when that purpose is accomplished.

Affirmative action, as it was, deviated from the original purpose into discrimination against Asian students.

There are a few other ways in which it failed, but a lot of it was because it was a general principle rather than a narrowly tailored, well structured initiative.

I'd like to see that kind of carefully built system proposed to fix issues more, but with the political system we have I do not believe it will happen publicly.

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