A Texas Long Reid: None dare call it racist gerrymandering ... but in Texas, it is
White Democrats are afraid to call what Texas Republicans are doing "racist." But that's exactly what it is.
Pop quiz: how many Black members of congress are there in the Blackest-by-percentage state of Mississippi:
Answer: one.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the January 6 Committee, represents one of the state’s four congressional districts. And Republicans achieve that by essentially scooping up all of the state’s nearly 40 percent Black population into a single district, and giving the other three to white Republicans.
Okay question two: how many U.S. congress members represent 17.6 percent Black New York?
Answer: four, including the seat held by the current House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.
The difference? Gerrymandering. Mississippi does it. New York does not (by Constitutional amendment — and neither does California for the same reason, at least for now.) And what is gerrymandering? It’s the deliberate creation of customized electoral districts to ensure that a given party wins more seats, unfairly. Gerrymandering can be strictly political, or it can be racial — designed to surgically manufacture “Black,” “white,” “Hispanic” or “Asian” supermajority districts for partisan ends, but for the additional purpose of reducing the power of whichever minority is gerrymandered.
John Roberts, our quietly corrupt chief justice of the Supreme Court, sees no problem with political gerrymandering. Just like he sees no problem with a former insurrectionist running for president, 14th Amendment’s Article 3 be damned. It’s the racial kind of gerrymandering that offends his pristine sensibilities. Especially if the racial gerrymandering “unfairly” helps The Blacks win more seats. Because as you know, John Roberts has made it his mission to protect white America from The Reverse Racism.
Which brings us to the great state of Texas.
How to turn Texas into Mississippi
They do everything bigger in Texas. The steaks are bigger. God forbid you order a burrito in a South Texas restaurant, it will be bigger than your plate. And when they do racism? Listennn…. they go hard.
Such is the case in the current Texas gerrymander fight. Governor Greg Abbott, on the orders of his master, Donald Trump, who last month, commanded the state legislature to seize five Democratic U.S. House seats to ensure that Republicans hold the House in next year’s midterms (and maybe steal some state House and Senate seats for Republicans in the process.) Trump is doing this, because he fears the accountability that could come from the speaker’s gavel changing hands — complete with potential investigations of his perversions of the Justice Department to achieve the retribution he craves, his outright grifting and self-dealing, and his warping of the entire federal government and constitution to meet his childish need for self-gratification and financial fulfillment without the need to actually work.
Trump is a convicted felon — in layman’s terms — a criminal. And as any criminal would, in his position, he is turning our government into a gangster’s paradise. The last thing he wants is a real congress, rather than the Potemkin joke that he has now, whose majority presently serve daily on their knees, to step in and take the reigns.
But what Abbott and the Texas state legislature are doing goes beyond Trump’s quest to save his own ass from accountability. This is no political gerrymander. Like everything about Trump, his presence offers Republicans — particularly the old, Southern neoconfederates who used to call themselves Democrats, then Dixiecrats, and sometimes Klansmen, to do the work they clearly were born to do: Trump is goofy, clownish shield behind which they can fuck with Black people.
It’s kind of their thing.
Since the moment the Civil War ended, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy have been fucking with Black people. They literally formed the Klan to terrify Black men out of voting. And they’ve devised every violent, tricksy and reprehensible scheme imaginable to stop Black men and women from using the ballot to gain real power in America, and to use that power to either punish racist wrongdoing, or prevent racist grifting.
In that fine tradition, Texas Republicans aren’t trying to seize those Democratic seats solely to ensure partisan preeminence — they’re doing it to punish Black Texans for ever wielding any power at all.
If their new maps go into effect, Texas Republicans, who typically get two-to-one representation at the state and federal level, despite Democrats typically winning more than 40 percent of the popular vote in an average election, would boost that share to four-to-one. Black Texans, who currently make up 12.7 percent of the state population, would likely retain just two seats — same as Alabama (which only has two after a rare, non-terrible Roberts Court decision.)
And don’t let Texas Republicans fool you into thinking they genuinely believe that their voters were deliberately under-represented after the last Census-triggered redistricting, because they have literally defended the current maps in court, under oath, before now, insisting their were “race blind.”
Not any more.
What Texas Republicans are now arguing, backed by the inverted “civil rights division” of the Trump Injustice Department, is that white people are under-represented in Texas government, and that they need to be protected by the drawing of new districts that reduce the number of Black and Latino legislators. The argument centers on the notion that the districts flagged by the Trump Injustice Department are “coalition districts,” designed to combine nonwhite voters into a group that can out-vote white people.
Four of Texas’ congressional districts were unconstitutional, the department warned. Three, the 9th, 18th and 33rd, were unconstitutional “coalition districts,” where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. The 29th, while majority Hispanic, was also unconstitutional, the letter said, because it was created by its two neighbors being coalition districts.
“It is well-established that so-called ‘coalition districts’ run afoul of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment,” assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon wrote, threatening legal action if Texas didn’t bring the districts into compliance.
On Wednesday, Texas House Republicans released their first draft of a redrawn map designed to give the GOP five new seats in next year’s midterms.
More on right wing activist Harmeet Dhillon here. (Spoiler alert: she’s not a fan of the Voting Rights Act…)
But to summarize, the gerrymander Texas Republicans are currently pursuing is designed to rebalance power so that white Texans get more, and Black and Latino Texans get less. It’s a racial gerrymander, not a political one.
And while yes, they are pursuing it on behalf of their president, they are choosing the districts to consolidate and collapse, not incidentally because those districts are or were held by four Black and one Latino member, but because of it. They are specifically choosing who to target, and who to disenfranchise in Texas, to punish Black and Brown people. Because Trump knows, and Greg Abbott knows, and every Texas Republican knows, that the only people guaranteed to hold Trump accountable for his criminality in America, are Black people. And the second most likely to hold Trump accountable, are Latinos who are woke to the reality that they will never be white enough for conservatives to not fuck with them.
To summarize: Donald Trump has been prosecuted, to date, by…
New York State Attorney General Letitia James, a Black woman who successfully sued him for defrauding New York (for which he currently owes the state nearly $600 million which he has yet to pay) and who also took down his family’s fake charity and his fake “university…” as well as his friends in the fraud-ridden NRA… Trump’s Injustice Department is currently investigating her for doing those investigations.
Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, also a Black woman, who indicted Trump and his gangland pack for attempting to steal the 2020 election by demanding that Georgia “find him” eleven thousand odd votes (the same request he has successfully pawned off on Abbott…)
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, a Black man, who gave Trump his felony designation in the New York hush money case. A case in which the judge was Juan Merchan, a Latino man. (Trump’s supporters now want him to be prosecuted. Which is actually an upgrade from MAGA wanting him killed, during the trial.
He has faced Black woman judge Tanya Chutkan in the Jack Smith investigations of his attempted January 6 insurrection, as well as the cases of many of his goons, who stormed the capitol.
See the pattern here?
Trump may keep lying about his supposedly historic support from Black voters (whom he is now rewarding with record unemployment) … and he did indeed get historic support from Latino (male) voters. But his approval ratings with Latinos have plummeted in the wake of him sicking his masked gestapo on them in blue states and even in Florida, where he has opened up a concentration camp surrounded by swamps and alligators specifically for them.
Trump clearly knows that he is in trouble, with his gains with Latinos evaporating, and Black folks again reminded what a shit he has always been to us. Even some white voters are breaking away, including a growing number of men, whom Trump is bankrupting with his stupid TACO tariffs and by erasing their farm sales by jettisoning USAID and nuking high fructose corn syrup (most American farms overproduce corn) in order to boost Big Sugar. (He’s probably getting a cut.)
In short, Trump knows his party is likely cooked next November if there is a free and fair election. So he is attempting to destroy Black and Latino people in advance, to make sure our communities are too weak, too dispirited, too impoverished, and too desperate to give him the justice he deserves.
It’s not political. It’s racial. And openly so. Trump has long exhibited undiluted racism toward Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian people and non-white immigrants. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature of who he is and who he has always been. He seems to fully believe every venal stereotype about everyone: that all Jews are good with money (and are all in fact, Israeli), all Blacks are good at sports but not worthy of managing his money or being visible at his clubs or running his business by winning the Apprentice; that Asian countries are stealing American jobs and cheating us (he switched on that from obsessing over Japan to obsessing over China) and that the Kremlin folks are our real friends. He believes that Haitians eat pets. Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists, but also natural born field slaves. You name it, if it’s a stereotype, he believes it.
But the one stereotype that he believes that actually is true, is that Black people have it in for him. We absolutely do. Only the sellouts among us can stand him (and the convicted sex offenders, Black nazis and violent sex pests.) Most of the rest of us know what’s up. And if we do help Democrats get back control of congress, you can best believe Black Liberated Democrats will seek to hold him accountable for his criminality, venality and unconstitutional seizure of this country’s faltering democracy.
Which brings us back to Texas, and what Republicans there are doing to try to punish Black people first, in advance.
A straight up racist gerrymander
Despite what Texas Democrats are foolishly promoting on their website, which plays right into the hands of Abbot and Republicans by portraying the gerrymander effort as political, not racial …
… which will only help Republicans at the Supere Court … what Republicans are doing in Texas isn’t gerrymandering for politics. It’s gerrymandering to impoverish and disempower Black Texans specifically and in targeted fashion, and to do the same to Texas Latinos.
According to State Rep. Jolanda Jones, who happens to be an attorney,, whose House District spans three of the impacted congressional districts, and who happens to pay close attention to the details of these things, here is what Abbott and company are doing. In old timey terms, it’s called “cracking and packing” — which is when you crack apart Black districts and reassemble them into less Black districts. Let’s get into it…
Let’s start with where the 4.3 million Black Texans — the largest Black population in the country — live. In such a big state, with nearly 30 million people, you’d be surprised how concentrated the Black population is:
The tiny orange dots on this very blue map show you where Black Texans live. The dark orange dots indicate that 70 percent or more of a population is Black. Light orange indicates 60 percent or more. You can see that most Black voters are packed into a tiny number of districts, mostly surrounding two big cities: Dallas and Houston. In fact, Harris County, where Houston is, is the second largest Black population in the country, behind Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is.
Looked at another way, the small blue dots are Harris and Dallas counties, and the districts that are being targeted for “cracking and packing” by Republicans.
Here’a total state look at the Republicans’ plan. Note how all of the red lines indicating changes in district boundaries are concentrated in the exact same places where Black Democrats live and vote:
…while the largely white remainder of the state is left almost entirely untouched. So let’s go into the districts.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett currently represents U.S. House District 30, covering much of Dallas, and Tarrant Counties. The District is 98.6 percent urban, 40 percent Black, 37 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white and 3.3 percent Asian as of 2023. With 773,000 people living there. Cook rates it D+25. Kamala Harris won the district 73-26 in 2024.
Rep. Mark Vesey, who is also Black, represents House District 33, also covering much of Dallas County and Tarrant County, and which actually was drawn as an Hispanic opportunity district following the 2010 Census. CD 33 is 57.6 percent Hispanic, 18.6 percent Black, 13.2 percent white and and 8.1 percent Asian. Vesey has typically won the seat anyway, due in part to the very low turnout among Latinos in Texas.
The new Texas maps literally draws Rep. Crockett’s home address out of District 30 and puts her literal residence, as well as her new political home, in District 33. According to sources in the Texas State House, Democratic reps got a call from state officials asking them to verify their home addresses, and suddenly, the new maps effectively evicted at least two of them from where they physically live. That includes Rep. Crockett, who would now in theory, have to run against Vesey for the same seat.
The new map also scoops Tarrant County, the third most populous Texas county, including Fort Worth, out of District 30 entirely, which is where most of Vesey’s vote has traditionally come from. Here’s the map, showing the shift:
In other words, the new map would force two popular Black representatives to battle it out to the death of one of their places in Congress.
But wait, there’s more!
The new map also strips the economic heart out of District 30 — taking away Love Field, and gifting it to a neighboring Republican district. As a result, what’s left of majority Hispanic CD 30 will be economically poorer, and both 33 and 30 will have half the Black representation they have today.
Now let’s go to Congressional Districts 9 and 18.
CD 9, represented by The Great Cane Shaker, Rep. Al Green, includes the Greater Houston area. It is 99.97 percent urban, 765,000 people strong, 39.3 percent Hispanic, 35.8 percent Black, 12.4 percent white and 9.7 percent Asian, as of 2023. It has been in Democratic hands since the Clinton era, and voted 75 percent for Obama in 2008 and 71 percent for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Congressional District 18, is, per Rep. Jones, the most historic Black district in Texas history. It’s first representative was the legendary Barbara Jordan, who in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to Congress from the American South.
Jordan was followed by Sheila Jackson Lee, a champion of the Juneteenth national holiday and of slavery reparations untl her death in the summer of 2024. Her daughter briefly held the seat until her mother’s term expired and then it was won by former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner. When he died this March, Greg Abbott delayed scheduling a special election to fill his seat until this November, leaving Texas short one seat in their congressional delegation. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill passed on July 3rd by a single vote.
In other words, Greg Abbott is who you have to thank for that $3 trillion Trump and Republicans put on your, your children’s, and your grandchildren’s credit card, just in time for Independence Day.
CD 18 is 99.9 percent urban, 43.4 percent Hispanic, 32.2 percent black, 16.7 percent white, and 4.9 percent Asian. Cook Political Report rates it D+21. And that apparently. just won’t do, for Abbott and Republicans.
So what are they doing to make sure Black Texans don’t help punish Trump for wrecking the economy and turning immigration into 1930s German cosplay?
They’re moving Representative Green out of CD 9 and moving him, along with more than 70 percent of his constituents, into Congressional District 18, where most of them have never, ever voted, and where Green has never run. Here’s how that looks in chart form. Here are the demographics of the districts right now. The top lines are the totals, and the bottom lines in each row are the voting age population. You can see that when Republicans are making their plans — as these are from their map proposals, they delineate the racial makeup of the districts they’re targeting for change: Anglo vs. Non-Anglo, Black Hispanic and Black and Hispanic combined.
District 29, currently held by Democrat Sylvia Garcia, who Black Texas Dems tell me is not exactly a friend of Black Texans, is three-quarters Hispanic and only 13.2 percent Black. That info will come in handy in a moment.
The plan to essentially scoop out huge parts of CD 9 and plop them into CD 18 is best explained visually. The numbers in red represent the original district, and the black represent Republicans’ proposed new maps. Note how far District 18 moves, from the approximate center of the map, much further down. And watch how the red number 9 shifts way to the right. Now if you follow the red lines around the old and the new districts, you see you dramatically the lines, and the voters impacted by them, change.
Now, here it is in chart form:
The leftmost colum shows you the district number. The next column shows you what percentage of the district will be moved into its new home; the center column shows you the number of voters (which is designed to continue adding up to the same number at the top — since under Texas law, all districts must have the same number of voters) the last two columns show you the percentage of voters who are “Anglo” (second to last column) and “Non-Anglo.” Because yes, Republicans calculated that. (And keep in mind that Anglo likely refers to “white non-Hispanic,” while Hispanic voters include voters who are both Hispanic, and tick off the Census box as “white,” so the “non-Anglo” number won’t exactly match the earlier Census figures.
So as you can see, the new CD 9 will retain just 2.9 percent of its original voters — picking up nearly half of the voters from overwhelmingly Hispanic D28, a quarter of nearly 40 percent white D36, and a fifth of the voters in nearly 50 percent white CD2. That will result in a District that in theory, would no longer be winnable by a Black candidate, based on this country’s tendency toward racially-determinative voting. And with Latino voter turnout still circling the drain, the jury’s out on whether any Democrat would win (and yes, Republicans looked at voter turnout in these districts, and white turnout is the highest in every single one.
Ditto CD 18, which will retain just a quarter of its original constituents, but pick up nearly all of CD 9’s voters — collapsing it into a single Black District that will set up a dog fight between incumbents and any other potential challengers.
The endgame here is to shrink two large Black-represented districts into one, reducing Black power by 50 percent in those districts, covering nearly 1.6 million Texans. And they’re not done there. District 18 also had an economic engine called George Bush Intercontinental Airport, which serves the Greater Houston area. The new maps excise the airport from District 18, along with two historic neighborhood called Acres Homes, leaving the historically Black district less economically sound. So even if Rep Green were to win in his “new” district, he would inherit a district with less economic opportunity than it started with.
independence heights, two of the first black independent cities settled in Houston Always in CD18, Mickey Leland, Barbara Jordan. Moved them into Garcia’s House District 29.
Now, let’s go to the Hispanic majority districts that are being targeted by the racial gerrymander gambit:
Democrat Henry Cuellar represents the 28th Congressional District on the outskirts of San Antonio and near Laredo, which is home to 799,580 Texans. It is 83 percent urban, 75 percent Hispanic, 17 percent white, 4.4 percent Black and 0.9 percent Asian.
Rep. Greg Casar represents the 35th Congressional District near Ausstin. It is 96 percent urban, 55.1 percent Hispanic, 26.2 percent white, 11.9 percent Black and 2.9 percent Asian.
And Democrat Vicente Gonzalez represents the 34th Congressional District near McAllen. It too was created following the 2010 Census as an Hispanic opportunity district. It is 84 percent urban, 90.3 percent Hispanic, 7.9 percent white, 0.6 percent Asian and 0.4 percent Black.
And here’s how the new maps would impact those seats:
The proposed map splits voters of color in Tarrant County among multiple neighboring Republican districts and changes the shape of the 35th District in Central Texas, which was originally created as a result of a court order to protect the voting rights of people of color.
Rep. Greg Casar, who represents the 35th District that runs from his hometown of Austin to San Antonio, slammed the map as an insult to Texas voters.
“If Trump is allowed to rip the Voting Rights Act to shreds here in Central Texas, his ploy will spread like wildfire across the country,” Casar said in a statement. “Everyone who cares about our democracy must mobilize against this illegal map.”
The changes would create two more districts in which white residents make up a majority of eligible voters, or citizens who are old enough to vote, hiking the number of such districts from 22 under the current map to 24. It would also add one additional district where Hispanic residents, the state’s largest demographic group, form the majority, bringing the total to eight under the new plan. And it would create two majority Black districts, where previously there were none.
The traditional racial politics of redistricting have been scrambled somewhat by Republicans’ increasing reliance on Hispanic voters, among whom they made historic gains in 2024. Four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn with the intention of flipping would be majority Hispanic — though the Hispanic populations in the new seats in Houston and Central Texas are almost exactly 50%.
The districts represented by Cuellar and Gonzalez — both of which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and anchored in South Texas — would become slightly more favorable to Republicans. Trump received 53% and 52% in those districts, respectively, in 2024; under the new proposed lines, he would have gotten almost 55% in both districts.
It’s hard to escape the racial game being played: pit Black and Latino members against each other to cut their numbers in half, while making two majority Hispanic districts redder. And they’re doing this while making the absurd claim that a map that again … currently looks like this, in a majority Hispanic state, is constitutionally injurious to white people.
Make it make sense with some explanation other than pure, unadulterated racism.
Many thanks to Rep. Jolanda Jones for providing the maps and data. You can watch our segment at the end of our Monday night show, by clicking here (and be sure to subscribe!)
Support Rep. Jones here
Find the Texas Black Democratic Coalition here
And get more info on their fight and fundraising push here
These maps are nuts! They are no longer hiding their racism.
I'm tired!! But I refuse to give up or give in.