Gerrymandering is a process in which district lines are redrawn. Originally, it was used to manipulate electoral district boundaries to give one political party an advantage over the other in elections. But recently, gerrymandering has been used to redraw school districts, and it has brought back something that has been dead in America for decades: school segregation.
One of the most prominent examples of gerrymandering has occurred in the Jefferson County School District in Alabama. Supporters of the redistricting process said it would benefit schools because they could easily make very localized decisions, which would affect schools in the area more directly. However, the redrawing of school districts has been shown to have different intentions behind it.
Racial gerrymandering is when districts are redrawn based around the location of minorities, usually in the hopes to make their impact on elections smaller. In the case of the schools, people basically wanted less minorities attending white schools.
“It gives us better control over the geographic composition of the student body.” a gerrymandering organizer said in a Facebook post.
In the Jefferson County School District, at least nine school communities left the Jefferson district so their schools would not have to bus in students from historically black neighborhoods or let them use school resources and materials.
“Those students do not contribute financially. They consume the resources of our schools, our teachers and our resident students, then go home.” said an organizer of the redistricting in Alabama.
Of course, segregation in schools has been illegal since the Brown vs. Board of Education supreme court case in 1954. However, since the supreme court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, legislators of mostly southern states have tried, and succeeded, in finding loopholes in the ruling, which is where the gerrymandering craze started.
“People who are fortunate enough to form utopias do so on the backs of other folks who have been excluded.” said Erika Wilson, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill law professor.
While gerrymandering has been mainly used for racist purposes, it can also be used to reduce the amount of segregation in certain areas. For example, if an area was already organized so people of a certain race were grouped together, redrawing boundaries so multiple races were now in the same district would allow these communities to integrate.
While this is a possibility, this kind of gerrymandering is rarely done. And racial gerrymandering has spread throughout the whole country. While racist practices like this are usually done in southern states like Alabama or Florida, states located further up north have also taken part, like Ohio or Delaware.
