I long took for granted that US opinion polls break down respondents into white people, black people and Hispanics. But I’ve come to look askance at this convention. Reporting on political views by race now seems perverse. It implies that a citizen’s primary identity is grounded in skin colour, and it reifies a way of thinking about the American people that is regressive, divisive, inaccurate and downright un-American.

I was reminded of this recent point of annoyance last week when the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that none too subtly contrived to create an additional majority-black district. (The district in question drizzled and blobbed diagonally from one northern corner of the state to the far southern one like a trail of ink on blotting paper.) The court’s conservative majority ruled that districting by race is unconstitutional. Democrats were horrified, because districts fixed as majority black are also traditionally fixed as majority Democratic.

For me, the issues are two: gerrymandering by race and gerrymandering, period.

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Rigging majority-black districts suggests that the interests of all black Americans are aligned by dint of simply being black and that those interests will not be represented by non-black voters. It likewise suggests black people will only achieve a political voice by electing representatives who are also black (which by and large black voters do) and that non-black voters will not elect black politicians – even though a white-majority electorate voted for a black........

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