Driving the news: On Tuesday night, Texas filed its final response for why its new map, drafted at President Trump's urging to give the GOP five new seats, should survive. Justice Samuel A. Alito temporarily reinstated Texas' GOP-favored congressional map last week, after a district court tossed it. Since then, briefs have been flooding the court, from the actual parties to outside interest groups to the state of Missouri.
During the rare rehearing of a Louisiana redistricting case in October, the court's conservative majority appeared inclined to weaken the Voting Rights Act's Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the political mapmaking process. Such a ruling could spark a new wave of congressional redistricting, especially in the South, where voting is often racially polarized and Section 2 has long prevented the dilution of Black minority voters' collective power.
There's a particular ache familiar to many Black residents in San Jose and across Silicon Valley: the uneasy realization that when you enter a room, you will likely be the only one who looks like you, while your story fades into the background as others take center stage. For decades, as new communities have thrived in the world's tech capital, the deep roots, culture and resilience of Black life in the South Bay too often go unseen.