The Theory’s Great--If America’s Colorblind : Where Supreme Court goes wrong in N. Carolina decision

There can be little argument that the congressional district the Supreme Court ruled illegal in its voting-rights decision Monday certainly looks like an egregious example of gerrymandering. But the ruling should not become the basis for a counterattack on the Voting Rights Act, or on the important political advances racial and ethnic minorities have made under that law.

In a narrow 5-4 decision the high court ruled that the North Carolina Legislature went too far in drawing the 12th Congressional District so that a majority of its voters would be African-American. And, indeed, a map of that district looks not so much like a salamander--the shape that in part put the term gerrymander in American political language in the 19th Century--as it does a snake. The long, narrow district was drawn to link black enclaves, from tobacco farms to urban ghettos, across 160 miles of North Carolina, from near the southern border to Durham in the north.

The court decided that such a sprawling, oddly shaped district was, in words of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the majority opinion, “ . . . so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling justification.”

Not quite. The “compelling justification,” as retiring Justice Byron R. White argued in his dissent, was to achieve the election of an African-American to Congress--something that North Carolina, before the existence of the oddly shaped district, had not done in modern times despite a 22% black population. That certainly was of “compelling interest,” and the state should have leeway in drawing political districts.

It would be wonderful, of course, if this were a colorblind society and people voted that way, as O’Connor wrote elsewhere in her opinion. But the sad fact is that race has mattered in voting, to the detriment of minority candidates. The effects of that history must be overcome before it can be forgotten. That’s why this newspaper has tended to look sympathetically on efforts to redraw political districts in California so Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans can have a better chance at being elected to public office. There is simply no faster way to give those minority groups--which in the aggregate are this state’s emerging majority--a stake in the political system than to allow their voices to be heard, and their interests represented, at all levels of government.

North Carolina’s mistake was to ignore other key principles of reapportionment, such as compact districts and respect for existing political subdivisions. When redistricting takes such things into account--as did California’s last reapportionment, in 1990--it is possible to draw districts that are not only fair to minorities but to other groups of voters as well. And, as many of the minority politicians elected in California in recent years have shown, they are capable of representing all their constituents, minority or not, effectively.

So let’s hope that the North Carolina decision will be seen as a narrow one--an effort to redress a particular wrong based on unique circumstances, and not an effort to roll back the important, and much-needed, advancement made under the Voting Rights Act. Let’s hope.