Thomas, J., dissenting
Nor could such a plan be explained by supposed respect for the Black Belt. For present purposes, I accept the District Court’s finding that the Black Belt is a significant community of interest. But the entire black population of the Black Belt—some 300,000 black residents, see Supp. App. 33—is too small to provide a majority in a single congressional district, let alone two.[1] The black residents needed to populate majority-black versions of Districts 2 and 7 are overwhelmingly concentrated in the urban counties of Jefferson (i.e., the Birmingham metropolitan area, with about 290,000 black residents), Mobile (about 152,000 black residents), and Montgomery (about 134,000 black residents). Id., at 83. Of the three, only Montgomery County is in the
- ↑ The equal-population baseline for Alabama’s seven districts is 717,154 persons per district.
capture black Mobilians are visually striking and are easily recognized as a racial grab against the backdrop of the State’s demography. The District 7 “finger,” which encircles the black population of the Birmingham metropolitan area in order to separate them from their white neighbors and link them with black rural areas in the west of the State, also stands out to the naked eye. The District Court disregarded the “finger” because it has been present in every districting plan since 1992, including the State’s latest enacted plan. Singleton v. Merrill, 582 F. Supp. 3d 924, 1011 (ND Ala. 2022) (per curiam). But that reasoning would allow plaintiffs to bootstrap one racial gerrymander as a reason for permitting a second. Because the question is not before us, I express no opinion on whether existing District 7 is constitutional as enacted by the State. It is indisputable, however, that race predominated in the original creation of the district, see n. 7, supra, and it is plain that the primary race-neutral justification for the district today must be the State’s legitimate interest in “preserving the cores of prior districts” and the fact that the areas constituting District 7’s core have been grouped together for decades. Karcher v. Daggett, 462 U. S. 725, 740 (1983); see also id., at 758 (Stevens, J., concurring) (explaining that residents of a political unit “often develop a community of interest”). The plaintiffs’ maps, however, necessarily would require the State to assign little weight to core retention with respect to other districts. There could then be no principled race-neutral justification for prioritizing core retention only when it preserved an existing majority-black district, while discarding it when it stood in the way of creating a new one.
