Lines of Oppression: How Gerrymandering Became the New Jim Crow

Barack Won, So They Drew the Lines to Make Sure It Never Happens Again

They Drew the Lines to Silence Us: How Republicans Target Black Voices and What Pennsylvania Must Teach the Nation

Let me tell you something straight and without sugar: this ain’t about politics. It’s about power. And it’s about how that power is being stolen—line by line, rule by rule, from Black voters, Democratic voters, and anyone who dares to believe in representative democracy.

Republicans don’t win because they’re more popular. Hell no. They win because they cheat and they’ve been doing it since the ink dried on Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008.

THE PLAN: REDMAP A Blueprint for Suppression

After Obama lit up the sky like a comet, something ugly came slithering out of the shadows: Operation REDMAP. That’s the Redistricting Majority Project. Karl Rove laid it out like a Bond villain in the Wall Street Journal, writing, “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” That wasn’t a metaphor. That was a blueprint.

They didn’t go after Congress first. Oh no, that’s too obvious. They went local state legislatures. They took a scalpel to statehouse maps in places like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas. They cracked and packed Black communities, sliced up urban centers, and surgically diluted the vote of anyone who threatened their power. This wasn’t just partisan hardball. This was racialized voter suppression dressed up as "strategy."

THE METHOD: GERRYMANDERING + PURGING VOTER ROLLS

Let’s connect the damn dots. You got REDMAP redrawing maps to favor Republicans in 2010. Then, like a thief with a second lockpick, they started purging voter rolls stripping people who hadn’t voted in four years, disproportionately Black, brown, poor, and young. Add in voter ID laws, closed polling stations, and manufactured panic about “fraud,” and what do you have?

A fake majority. A government chosen not by the people, but by map-riggers and vote-scrubbers. Republicans can’t win fair fights, so they’ve made sure fair fights don’t happen.

And guess what? It worked. They took the House in 2010. Then the Senate. Then, with a gerrymandered boost, they gave Donald Trump the map he needed to walk right into the White House in 2016. This is a long game, folks and they’ve been playing chess while too many of us have been trying to survive.

THE TARGET: BLACK VOICES AND BLACK VOTERS

Now let us bring this bitter truth home home to this moment, right here, in Texas. What’s unfolding isn’t merely a political maneuver it is a political lynching of Black representation. Jasmine Crockett. Al Green. These are not just legislators—they are the living embodiment of voices that have too long been ignored, manipulated, or erased. They speak for the people who have never been truly welcomed into the promise of America. And for that, they are now being targeted in broad daylight.

Not with billy clubs or bombs this time, but with voting maps, drawn in back rooms with surgical precision. It’s not that they hate the vote. They fear the power inside that vote. Because, as the band Living Colour once screamed into the soul of a generation, “When a leader speaks, a leader dies.” And so rather than make martyrs of them as they did with Dr. King, James Chaney, Fred Hampton they kill their constituencies. They murder the map instead of the man.

This is the new assassination not of bodies, but of representation. It is no less violent, only more polite. They silence you not with bullets, but with boundaries. No chalk lines on pavement just red lines on a map. But make no mistake: Trump hates Crocket and Green and they are drawing lines to erase them and 3 other democrats seats in Texas . And that should shame every soul that still pretends to believe in freedom. But let’s face it Republicans are shameless.

Rep. Crockett said it herself: “They want to mute our voices so they can have an oversized say.” That’s not paranoia. That’s the strategy, straight from the REDMAP playbook.

THE DEFENSE: PENNSYLVANIA FOUGHT BACK AND WON

But here’s the thing: we’ve seen what fighting back looks like. And we’ve seen it work.

In Pennsylvania, in the 2018 case League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth, the state Supreme Court overturned a REDMAP-style map. They said loud and clear: a vote that’s diluted is not equal. That ain’t democracy. That’s the rigging of a nation.

The court said what needs to be said everywhere: Every Pennsylvanian must have the same free and equal opportunity to select their representatives. That decision gave us a new, fairer mapand helped flip seats blue in 2018 and 2020. It was a model of how the courts can be the last firewall between tyranny and representation.

But that firewall only holds if the justices stand strong and stay in office. Which brings us to now: retention of these Pennsylvania Supreme Court judges is everything. If we lose them, we lose the map. We lose power. We open the floodgates to the same gerrymandering hellscape they’re cooking up in Texas.

THE CALL: PENNSYLVANIA MUST NOT BECOME TEXAS

So let me put it plainly: if we don’t fight like hell in Pennsylvania, we will become Texas. We will watch our Jasmine Crocketts and Al Greens get drawn out of their districts, their communities shattered, their voices silenced by a damn Sharpie wielded in a backroom by white men drunk on power and nostalgia.

This is not a drill. This is the frontline.

This is why we vote in judicial retentions.
This is why we organize around state legislatures.
This is why we protect Black districts from being gerrymandered into extinction.

But here’s what else we must do:
We have to register voters Democrats, yes, but also unaffiliated voters who stand with us.
This isn’t just a partisan fight. This is a moral one. And there are people young people, working people, independents, disillusioned voters—who may not wear the Democratic label, but they believe in democracy. They believe in fairness. They believe in the promise of America when it actually lives up to its ideals.

We need them. And we need them registered as Democrats . Zohran Mamdani registered 36,000 Democrats 11 days before the NY Primary, and we need a counter and register voter to hold the Supreme Court Republicans are fighting like hell in race that historically got little recognition but not this year. Here’s Scott Prestler, look at this board, so we gotta fight to hold those lines.

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Because for every rigged map, our answer must be a flood of new voters.
For every district they redraw, our response must be a renewed commitment to organize, to show up, to cast ballots with the power of generations behind us.

They know what we know:
When Black voters rise, when young voters rise, when the silenced speak—America changes.

That’s why they redraw the lines.
That’s why they purge the rolls.
That’s why they cheat

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So what do we do?

We fight. With truth. With votes. With fire in our bellies and memory in our bones.

Let Pennsylvania be a beacon, not a battleground. Let Texas know we see them. And let every courtroom, every ballot box, and every district line ring with this message:

We will not be erased. And we are not done.