Yeah ... ranting again. (I'm just pi$$ed off with the Virginia Supreme Court ruling)
The core problem we're having here is NOT that minorities will not be represented by minority representatives. That is just one of the downstream effects from what the real problem is.
The real problem is elected officials are given the ability to manipulate the outcome of an election by putting people in specific buckets. It is, in other words, the ability granted to the electee to pick their own electors. THAT is the fundamental problem here.
Every time I hear people talking about the disappearance of majority minority districts as the main problem of what's going on here, I cringe. To me, that's like nails on a chalkboard because it cedes the ground, however unwittingly, that political gerrymandering is not the actual problem here. A political party who has, at best, 1/3 of the votes is commanding more than 50% of the representation. Whether that representation is white or black or brown is as entirely secondary as it is a secondary by product of the deeper problem.
Phrasing this as a racial minority issue is itself a result of the inability of Democrats/liberals/center left to move beyond the politics of the civil rights era. That's the era that liberals/Democrats had their last, biggest victory. That's era that Democrats/liberals actually had a vision for America, and had fresh ideas, and were pushing forward. So just like that grown a$$ guy whose sense of self is forever locked into the high school football team that he was the stare of, every current conflict, every current political problem is seen through the lens that is the civil rights era politics. (I think that's also why we can't seem to ever get rid of the septuagenarians and octogenarians running (and their spiritual clones like Hakeem Jeffries) the Democratic Party.
And that is why this overt power grab by the right that is pretty much a fait accompli at this point is weirdly being squeezed into this very specific narrative of majority minority districts -- which, by the way, is an absolutely losing proposition since the right actually won the rhetorical war "removing race as a factor" from districting. The same way they won the rhetorical war on affirmative action. And they will keep losing that rhetorical war as long as their core argument is to bring racial equality by tipping the scale, one way or another, in favor of some other racially defined group. There is an inherent contradiction in the solution proposed (which, to be fair, was supposed to be a temporary work around until we reach a racially neutral society, but you know how work arounds get productized in our politics; see employer provided healthcare).
We need to shift the debate now. The problem with what's going on will not be solved if Republicans, just hypothetically, offer a bunch of black conservatives as the representatives in the districts that absorbed black populations. (That would obviously never happen, btw.) The problem is their ability to tailor the outcome of the elections by playing with district boundaries.
Proportional representation is the answer and this is very clearly one of the hills that I am willing to die on. It is the winner take all nature of our elections that is core problem here. Everything else is a consequence of that. Trying to make districts fairer is a pipe dream that will always remain an area of contention and a weakness to exploit, as is being amply demonstrated by the political camp that has been patiently building for dominance for decades. They arrived. Trump delivered them.
The least we can do is to be smart. Identify the core problem(s). And think big. If there is any chance that the US will continue as the US that Americans believe that it is or can be, there has to be a big vision here that is necessarily very different from what we already have. Trying to keep things the same or return to an earlier state as the solution to our current problems is not only the definition of insanity, but frankly, it's also a fairly (small c) conservative approach.
We're not getting out of this pile of sh*t and make things better for everyone by simply tinkering at the edges or going back to "the way it was supposed to be". We tried that. It didn't work.
Americans are tired of these gerrymandering battles. This is a problem they can understand in their bones. Offer them an actual solution rather than promising that we will go back to racially defined districts in the name of representation.