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If you're worried about any kind of minority, racial or otherwise, having representation in government, there are better ways than carving up districts where they'll plausibly win a seat.
Enforced gerrymandering is a hack to get a desired outcome some of the time, when with a refactor we could build the desired outcome into the system. Add or change one of the legislative houses so that we have proportional representation.
I mean the straightforwards way to give blacks representation in Louisiana is to have the blacks elect 1/3 of the reps and whites(ok, 'everyone else', but in practice they are white) the other two thirds. That just happens to be illegal under the VRA, too- AFAICT the black majority districts is illegal too, just less blatantly so.
Even that straightforward approach has some interesting questions to handle about rounding. In this case, 1/3 of 6 seats works out, but it's not hard to look at other states and imagine "24.9 percent of two seats" or things like that.
This is well studied problem in parliamentary democracies where the seats are assigned at the level of the whole country, rather than by district. It is also applicable to determining for each first level division of a country how many seats it should have in the lower house, given the population (not counting Indians not taxed) of each such division.
Apportionment is the key word here, and here is a cool demo showing various methods (click on the name of the method for further description).
I'm going to get on my hobby horse about apportionment.
First, I'm going to assume everyone is familiar with the Constitutional Apportionment Amendment.
For those unaware, there are three premises to this amendment, although it only lists three stages instead of repeating forever:
First, there is maximum number of people per seat.
Second, based on the total population and the number of people per seat, there is a number of total seats.
Third, every time the number of total seats increases by 100, the number of people per seat increase by 10,000.
This started with 30k people per seat for all populations between 0 and 3 million (3m/30k = 100 seats), then 40k between 3 and 8 million (8m/40k = 200 seats), and then 50k for anything higher than that.
If this was continued, and given the 331m on the 2020 census, 308m from 2010, and 281m from 2000, the minimum house seat count would be 1564, 1625, and 1700. In 2000, we'd have 180k per seat maximum, in 2010 it would be 190k, and in 2020 we'd be able to have districts of up to 200k people, and no fewer than 1700 seats. Apportioned so that Wyoming gets its 3 representatives, that puts our max size at 192,283.
This also fixes the Electoral College. Wyoming goes from 1 representative to 3 (2.9 rounded up), while California goes from 52 to a whopping 205. The electoral votes are these +2, so instead of 18x the electoral vote, it's 41x. That's still not equal to the 69x population difference, but it goes a long way towards smoothing the worst problems.
If someone wants to tell me how to format a table I'll make this prettier, but here are the counts by my reckoning.
With so many votes in a single state, I would also add the Nebraska/Maine-style split electors to the mix to dilute the power of swing states.
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Without drastically changing how representatives work, Montana's one house seat isn't going to reflect its entire populace. By some definitions, single-seat states are the most gerrymandered (slaps roof "this district can fit so many minorities without giving any of them representation!"), although clearly not so by local legislative intent.
Montana has two seats. The one seat states are- Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, the Dakotas, and Alaska.
TIL: It had only one until 2022 (and had two previously last century). My memory wasn't completely wrong there.
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