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Notes -
IIRC most of the legislation in question from the 60s is, as-written, race-neutral. Those laws generally say "on the basis of race", not "against Black people". In practice there was an agreed-upon direction, and nobody until fairly recently (if now) has gotten much push-back on discrimination against white people, especially those in the South ("segregation" always brings to mind George Wallace, and never redlining in Detroit or Chicago --- not endorsing, just observing), and most of the interpretation of the text of the law by the judicial branch has been heavily-colored by this expectation.
But it is an interesting set of questions about how existing norms adopted against an era of bipolar segregation apply to a modern multi-polar racial society. Maybe there are some echoes of how some world leaders (Putin comes to mind) are attempting to claim a multi-polar world. Once we start considering, I dunno, French-speaking Cajuns, it isn't clear that our ideal districts can be planar. And what we'd do if we "ended segregation" and lived in homogenized neighborhoods (IIRC Singapore does this by fiat), how would we achieve what Gingles asks if the other reasons for the decision were still present?
That said, I think the easiest fix to gerrymandering is to move away from geographic districting, probably to a slate-of-candidates system.
The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act are what are at issue here. The original Section 2 was just
The later version is
Section 10303(f)(2) is about "language minority groups", which are certainly not mentioned in the 15th Amendment. But it's (b) which is the problem here. Taken literally, "in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice" says a racial, color, or language minority is having its right to vote violated precisely by the fact that it IS a minority. It establishes some sort of group right, one in direct contravention to the individual right guaranteed. If we have equal protection of individuals and "one man, one vote", then in as much as a minority group is cohesive in its political desires and opposed to a cohesive majority, then as a group it will have less opportunity (than the majority) to elect representatives of its choice. The Gingles test resolves this contradiction in favor of the group.
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