Why Redistricting Matters (It's Not As Simple As You Think)
On December 6, 2021 Diversity Declaration Committee representative Bama Athreya testified before the Maryland General Assembly Rules and Executive Nominations Committee in support of the Maryland Legislative Redistricting Committee’s proposal to redraw Congressional district lines in Maryland. Diversity Matters opposed a separate plan put forward by a ‘Citizens Redistricting Committee’ convened by Maryland’s Governor.
Why did we decide to weigh in on redistricting? We realized an important point was missing from the debate. Our communities were badly undercounted in the 2020 Census, and it is on this flawed census that maps are being drawn.
We highlighted how people of color and new immigrants are often marginalized through redrawn maps. Systemic redlining and other historical inequities throughout the United States also affect where many of our citizens can live. This has enabled what is sometimes described as a ‘pack and crack’ strategy intended to dilute the power of our votes. But what happens when, as will soon be the case in Maryland, we become a majority-minority population?
We know communities of color were undercounted in the 2020 Census and this was not accidental. The Trump Administration took extraordinary measures to undermine the 2020 Census count, including by attempting to introduce a ‘citizenship question’ with the purpose of deterring millions of immigrants and their families from responding. This is an issue of particular salience for Maryland, with its rapidly growing immigrant population. Data from Urban Institute shows Black residents in Maryland were undercounted by 2.46 percent. Latino residents were undercounted by 1.87 percent and families with at least one noncitizen were undercounted by 3.18 percent. Conversely, Whites in Maryland were overcounted by 0.87 percent.
Some of the organizations using names that include terms like “fair maps” are reinforcing the invisibility of our communities. By design, communities of color, including Black, Latino and new immigrant communities have been densely clustered in areas that have been undercounted, but these are also areas that are likely to grow over the next decade. That is why sometimes neat geographic boundaries on redistricting maps actually reinforce the over-weighting of representation in predominantly white, rural districts. And our national map is already far too heavily weighted against the majority of Americans who live in diverse and urban areas.
Redistricting happens every few years with changes in population, with reapportionment happening every ten years due to the census. We need to be very, very careful not to use methodologies to create ‘fair’ maps that are ahistorical and acontextual. Redistricting must take into account the intentional and politically driven undercounting of certain communities. And it should avoid a false equivalence between measures intended to address this and restore equity, and those that reinforce voter suppression and exclusion.
People, not land parcels, should pick their representatives. No map in America can yet be considered ‘fair’ when so many of our communities of color still face overwhelming barriers just to cast their vote, and when their votes are routinely diluted by decades of combined redlining and gerrymandering.