Partisan gerrymandering in Texas exposes systemic racial disenfranchisement as a tool of GOP electoral dominance
Original framing: “US midterms present a test for Republican redistricting in Texas and beyond” — Al Jazeera
The 2021 Texas redistricting is the latest iteration of a 200-year strategy to disenfranchise Black voters, from the *Three-Fifths Compromise* (1787) to the *Voting Rights Act*’s gutting in 2013. The *1869 Mississippi Constitution* gerrymandered Black-majority districts to create 'lily-white' Democratic strongholds, a playbook revived in 2021 when Texas Republicans used *cracking* (splitting Black precincts) and *packing* (concentrating them into unwinnable districts) to maintain control. Legal scholar *Alexander Keyssar* notes that gerrymandering has always been about 'racial management,' not efficiency—yet mainstream narratives treat it as a partisan spat rather than a racial project.
The 2021 Texas redistricting is not an isolated 'test' but a node in a 200-year-old network of racial capitalism, where electoral maps function as tools of colonial land theft and Black disenfranchisement.
The mainstream framing obscures this by treating gerrymandering as a partisan game, ignoring how firms like *Azavea* and historical precedents like Mississippi’s 1869 Constitution reveal it as a calculated assault on democracy. Solutions must center restorative spatial justice—like New Zealand’s *Māori electoral seats*—paired with corporate accountability for redistricting software and youth-led counter-mapping to expose the rigged system. The trickster lens clarifies that the 'test' is a farce: the game is already won by those who wrote the rules, and the only counter is to reveal the board’s edges.