Coffee with Patty: Gerrymandering, Louisiana, and Why I’m Worried About Jim Crow 2.0
Hey friends, grab your coffee.
Today I want to talk about something that sounds boring on purpose: gerrymandering. If your eyes just tried to glaze over, that’s not an accident. The people who benefit from this stuff are counting on you to tune out the minute you hear the word.
But if you care about literally anything politics touches, your kid’s school, abortion rights, policing, climate, student loans, your grocery bill, this is upstream of all of it. If the maps are rigged, the “democracy” part is already over before you ever walk into a voting booth.
So let’s break this down like we’re at my kitchen table, not in a law school classroom.
“I’m against gerrymandering. Period.”
Let me start with where I stand, so there’s no confusion.
I’m against gerrymandering. Full stop. I don’t care whether it’s Democrats doing the squiggly‑octopus‑district thing or Republicans doing the snake‑through‑three‑counties trick. If politicians are drawing maps to keep themselves safe, I’m not on board.
What I am in favor of is states redrawing maps based on real voter input and clear rules, independent commissions, transparent hearings, and regular people being able to look at a map and say, “Yeah, that kind of makes sense.” You know… actual democracy.
So when I tell you I’m deeply uncomfortable with what the Supreme Court just did in this Louisiana case, it’s not because I secretly love “my side’s” gerrymandering. It’s because this ruling takes a hammer to one of the few tools we had to stop racial vote‑rigging, and it’s being sold with language that sounds neutral and reasonable until you see who loses power.
Plain‑English gerrymandering: “You still get to vote, you just never get to win.”
Here’s how I explain gerrymandering to people who don’t live on Court‑watch Twitter.
Gerrymandering is when politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking politicians.
Two main tricks show up again and again:
Cracking: Take a community that could actually win a seat, say, a city where Black, brown, and working‑class folks have finally built enough power to elect someone who represents them, and slice it into three or four pieces. Suddenly, that community is a small minority in each district and never gets to elect “their” candidate anywhere.
Packing: Take a bunch of those same voters and shove them all into one ultra‑safe district. They’ll win big there, sure, but their influence is basically quarantined, and surrounding districts become safer for the other side.
On paper, nothing has been “taken” from you. You still get a ballot. You still stand in line. You still press the button. But the lines were drawn to make sure your vote is almost always outnumbered.
This is the part where people start saying, “Well, that sounds shady, but isn’t that just politics?” And that’s exactly the story the Supreme Court is leaning into: “Everybody does it, it’s just partisanship.”
Except that, in a country with our history, “just partisanship” and race are welded together in a lot of places. When you pretend they’re separate, you end up re‑creating Jim Crow with better manners and nicer fonts.
So what happened in Louisiana?
Let’s talk about the case that set my POMP alarm off: Louisiana v. Callais.
Louisiana is about one‑third Black. For years, they had only one congressional district where Black voters actually had a fair shot at electing their candidate of choice. The rest of the map basically cracked and packed Black communities, so their power never really lined up with their share of the population.
Lower courts looked at this and said, “Yeah, that’s a problem under the Voting Rights Act.” They told the state, essentially: you need to draw a second district where Black voters have a fair opportunity to elect someone, because the current map is diluting their votes.
So, Louisiana drew a new map. It wasn’t pretty; it was one of those long, oddly shaped districts that snaked across the state to pull together Black‑majority areas, and surprise, a group of white voters sued. Their argument was:
“This map is unconstitutional because race was the main reason it was drawn this way. The state is favoring Black voters at our expense.”
Fast‑forward to this year: the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, agreed with them. The Court said Louisiana’s fix was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that the Voting Rights Act didn’t actually require them to create that second Black‑majority district in the first place.
Translation into normal human language:
When the state ignored Black voters’ power? That was apparently fine for years.
When the state finally tried to fix that and give Black voters a second real seat at the table? That, suddenly, was “going too far” with race.
The majority basically said, “You can’t sort voters by race like this, even to comply with the Voting Rights Act.” The dissent basically said, “If you can’t use race at all to undo racial discrimination, then the Voting Rights Act becomes almost useless.”
I know which of those two sentences lines up with reality on the ground.
Why this feels like Jim Crow 2.0
Let’s be honest: when we say “Jim Crow,” a lot of people picture grainy black‑and‑white photos, segregated water fountains, and literacy tests. It feels like ancient history that “we fixed.”
But Jim Crow wasn’t just about who sat where. It was about locking political power away from Black communities so completely that it didn’t matter if they begged, protested, or prayed; nothing changed.
The modern version doesn’t need a sign that says “No Black People Allowed” at the polling place. It can look like this instead:
Closing or moving polling places in certain neighborhoods.
Complicated voter ID rules that hit certain communities harder than others.
Purging voter rolls aggressively.
And yes, drawing maps so that even when Black, brown, and younger voters turn out in big numbers, the way the lines are drawn means they almost never actually flip a seat.
The Louisiana decision is part of that pattern. It tells states:
“If you try to design your map in a way that actually corrects for racial vote dilution, we might slap you down for being ‘too race‑conscious.’ But if you draw a map that quietly keeps minority voters scattered and powerless, we’re probably going to call that ‘just politics.’”
That is how you rebuild Jim Crow without ever saying the words.
You don’t have to bar someone from voting if you can move them into a district where their vote is engineered to never matter.
“But Patty, aren’t you just mad because it helps Republicans?”
Nope.
I would be just as loud if Democrats were doing this, which, by the way, in some states, they absolutely try to. This isn’t about which color team wins; it’s about whether the scoreboard means anything.
Here’s the line I try to hold:
I’m against partisan gerrymandering. I don’t want a map that guarantees X number of Democratic or Republican seats no matter what voters do.
I’m also against racial gerrymandering that intentionally weakens the political voice of Black, Latino, Indigenous, or any other community.
But I am for using real‑world data, where people live, how they vote, where discrimination has happened, to make sure we aren’t just locking old injustices in place with new lines.
You can believe all three of those things at the same time. It’s not contradictory to say:
“I don’t want maps rigged for anybody. I do want maps that stop replicating a system where Black communities show up and still can’t get fair representation.”
What “better” looks like
So if this is all so messy and politicized, what does a healthier system look like?
To me, “better” looks like:
Independent citizen commissions drawing maps instead of legislators drawing their own districts like they’re picking bedrooms in a new house.
Public hearings where regular people can say, “Hey, that line cuts my neighborhood, my tribe, my language community in half.”
Clear, neutral rules: districts should be contiguous, reasonably compact, and not so blatantly skewed that one party keeps most seats even when they lose the popular vote in the state.
And layered on top of that, a serious commitment not to pretend race doesn’t exist in a country that has spent centuries using race to decide who gets power.
That last piece is what the Louisiana ruling really slices into. It tells states: “You fix racial discrimination at your legal peril.” And that message chills anybody trying to do the right thing.
Real‑life consequences, not just theory
Let’s pull this out of the abstract.
In Louisiana, this ruling means Black voters are likely going back to one real “opportunity district” instead of two, even though they’re roughly a third of the population. That’s one fewer voice in Congress speaking from and for those communities on everything from economic policy to hurricane relief to criminal justice.
Zoom out, and other states are watching. They’re already lining up to redraw maps, mid‑decade, to squeeze minority‑heavy districts back down or split them up entirely, confident that the courts will now be more likely to shrug and call it “just politics.”
If you live in one of those states, the next time you show up at the polls and wonder, “Why does nothing ever change here?”, the answer might not be your neighbors; it might be the map.
Okay Patty, this is depressing. What do we do?
I know, this is heavy for a coffee chat. But I don’t bring this to you so you’ll curl up and doomscroll. I’m talking about it because the whole strategy depends on us being bored, confused, and checked out.
A few places where our power still matters:
State‑level fights: Congress is gridlocked, but states can pass their own voting rights protections and create independent redistricting commissions. Some already have. Paying attention to those boring‑sounding ballot measures? That matters.
Local hearings: When new maps are proposed, there are usually “public hearings” nobody shows up to. If the only people in the room are lobbyists and insiders, guess whose map gets adopted.
Support the folks doing the lawsuits and the organizing: Civil‑rights orgs and local voting rights groups are out there trying to push back in court and on the ground. Many of them are chronically underfunded compared to the people trying to lock the system down.
And at the personal level: talk about this. Not just with highly online people. With your cousin, who only half pays attention. With your friend who votes every four years and then says, “Nothing ever changes.”
If they don’t understand the map game, they’re going to keep blaming themselves or their neighbors instead of the rigged playing field.
If this helped you understand what’s going on, share it with one person who thinks “my vote doesn’t matter.”
And if you want more of these coffee chats about how power really works, hit subscribe so you don’t miss the pod episode that’s coming out of this.