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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.
The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.
It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?
The solution here would be an arms length neutral body made up of experts from non-political backgrounds which deicdes on districts and isn't subject to the executive in who's on it. A bit like how the Judicial Appointments Comission decides on who to appoint as judges in the UK completely independent from whoever is in government at the time. All the gerrymandered angular districts would disappear in one fell swoop and things would look a lot more reasonable.
Perhaps nice compact districts like this.
Anyway, we lack angels in the form of neutral experts to redistrict us.
My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.
My trolling solution is to randomly assign voters to districts: "look ma, no consideration at all of race, creed, or anything". Except that it's definitionally the worst possible gerrymander.
Honestly, I think geographic districting is a lost cause and proportional statewide representation would at least give easy answers to these problems.
I'm pretty sure this one of the Supreme Court partisan gerrymandering cases had this exact fact-pattern. They wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of possible maps that all comply with "traditional districting criteria", then picked the map that had the most Republican seats.
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