Invisible Red Lines: Gerrymandering and the Black Community

By Mustafa Ali, Word in Black

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In district after district, from Birmingham to Baton Rouge, Flint to Fort Worth, Black voters have been packed together or cracked apart — clustered just enough to be ignored, or split just enough to be irrelevant. The result is the same: communities stripped of their ability to shape the decisions that shape their lives.

And that has consequences.

Gerrymandering doesn’t just kill democracy. It kills people.

Let’s say you live in a majority-Black community, sliced out of political influence by district lines drawn with surgical precision. Your representative doesn’t need your vote, so they don’t need to care. And if they don’t need to care, they won’t fight for Medicaid expansion. They won’t push for clean energy investments. They won’t demand accountability for toxic waste dumped down the road from your child’s school.

So your babies breathe in diesel, your elders can’t afford insulin, and your water smells like something you shouldn’t touch, let alone drink.

The same political machinery that redlined us into underfunded neighborhoods is gerrymandering us out of the halls of power. It’s the same machinery. Different gears, same grind. We’re seeing that machinery at full throttle right now in places like Texas, where state lawmakers have launched a mid-decade redistricting effort — one not driven by population shifts, but by raw political ambition.

Discover the specific ways gerrymandering is impacting our communities.

See how redlining still impacts Black communities and the power grid.

Check out more Breaking News.