Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious Districting: A Case of the Emperor's Clothes
![handle is hein.journals/tlr71 and id is 1609 raw text is: Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious
Districting: A Case of the Emperor's Clothes
Lani Guinier*
[N]ow that the first round of reapportionment has been accomplished,
there is need to talk one man-one vote a little less and to talk a
little more of political equity, and of functional components of
effective representation. A mathematically equal vote which is politi-
cally worthless because of gerrymandering or winner-take-alldistrict-
ing is as deceiving as emperor's clothes. '
With voices pitched in the high decibel range, critics of race-conscious
districting2 are blasting the Voting Rights Act and its 1982 amendments.
A recent Wall Street Journal headline declares that voting is now rigged
by race.' Ethnic activists, the writer asserts, are collaborating with GOP
operatives in an unholy political alliance to herd minorities into their own
convoluted urban districts in order to improve GOP prospects in majority
white suburban areas.5 According to such critics, this is a political one-
* Professor of Law, University of PennaylvaniaLaw School. B.A. 1971, Radcliffe College; J.D.
1974, Yale Law School. © Copyright with the author. I thank all those who read this article and en-
couraged me to pursue my ideas, despite the apparent political costs. I greatly benefitted from my par-
ticipation in the November 1992 University of Texas School of Law Symposium on Redistricting; in
the September 1992 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois; and in
the October 1992 Legal Studies Workshop at the University of Minnesota Law School. For their par-
ticularly valuable comments and criticisms, I thank Alex Aleinikoff, Phil Frickey, Sam Issacharoff,
Pamela Karlan, Randy Kennedy, Dan Lowenstein, Frank Michelman, Rick Pildes, Susan Sturm, Gerald
Torres, and Larry Tribe. Ann Bartow, Anthony Gay, and Robert Tintner provided very helpful re-
search assistance.
1. ROBERT G. DIXON, JR., DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION: REAPPORTIONMENT IN LAW AND
POLTICS 22 (1968) (emphasis added).
2. I use the term race-conscious districting to describe the practice of consolidating the number
of minority group members in a single or a few winner-take-all subdistricts. Yet, in a racially polarized
environment, the process of districting is inevitably race-conscious. See Lani Guinier, The Representa-
don of Minority Interests: The Question of Single-MemberDistricts, 14 CARDozO L. REv. 1135, 1135
n.2 (1993) (arguing that winner-take-all districts ultimately enable one group or another to dominate,
meaning there is a racial consequence to the demographic constitution of all racially mixed districts if
voting is racially polarized). See also infra notes 116-117 and accompanying text.
3. 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971-1974 (1988).
4. Jim Sleeper, Rigging the Vote by Race, WALL ST. J., Aug. 4, 1992, at A14. Sleeper admits
he has taken many of his ideas about the Voting Rights Act from ABIOAIL M. THERNSTROM, WHOSE
VOTES COuNT? (1987). Id.
5. Sleeper, supra note 4, at A14.
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Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious Districting: A Case of the Emperor's Clothes
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