As she travels around Georgia to promote fair redistricting, Djemanesh Aneteneh has heard many tales of how partisan lawmakers create voting maps designed to take away the political voice of communities of color. She’s not surprised.

“Gerrymandering has always happened in the U.S., and both parties have always done it and will always do it,” says Aneteneh, 25, a redistricting coordinator with Fair Count. “In the South, generally gerrymandering has hurt and continues to hurt communities of color.”

Gerrymandering also tends to make many races uncompetitive. As a result of the last round of gerrymandering in Georgia in 2011, five of the state’s 14 congressional incumbents ran unopposed in November 2016.

Fair Count, a Georgia voting rights organization started by Stacey Abrams, has been organizing community mapping efforts in which marginalized people draw their own district maps to present to lawmakers. The citizen-drawn districts often are fairer than those drawn by politicians, and if lawmakers ignore those maps and instead gerrymander districts for political advantage, the community-created maps can become evidence in future anti-discrimination lawsuits.

This surge of voting rights outreach follows the release of the 2020 census data, which states are using to draw the maps that will allocate political power and representation for the next decade at every level of government, from Congress to local governments. This year, Fair Count and other advocates face a redistricting landscape that offers new challenges but also some reason for guarded optimism.

Read the full article about racial gerrymandering by Linda Kramer Jenning at YES! Magazine.