Thomas, J., dissenting
Black Belt. The plaintiffs’ maps, therefore, cannot and do not achieve their goal of two majority-black districts by “join[ing] together” the Black Belt, as the majority seems wrongly to believe. Ante, at 13. Rather, their majority-black districts are anchored by three separate high-density clusters of black residents in three separate metropolitan areas, two of them outside the Black Belt. The Black Belt’s largely rural remainder is then divided between the two districts to the extent needed to fill out their population numbers with black majorities in both. Respect for the Black Belt as a community of interest cannot explain this approach. The only explanation is the plaintiffs’ express racial target: two majority-black districts and statewide proportionality.
The District Court nonetheless found that race did not predominate in the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps because Dr. Duchin and Mr. Cooper “prioritized race only as necessary … to draw two reasonably compact majority-Black congressional districts,” as opposed to “maximiz[ing] the number of majority-Black districts, or the BVAP [black voting-age population] in any particular majority-Black district.” Singleton v. Merrill, 582 F. Supp. 3d 924, 1029–1030 (ND Ala. 2022) (per curiam). This reasoning shows a profound misunderstanding of our racial-gerrymandering precedents. As explained above, what triggers strict scrutiny is the intentional use of a racial classification in placing “a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.” Miller, 515 U. S., at 916. Thus, any plan whose predominant purpose is to achieve a nonnegotiable, predetermined racial target in a nonnegotiable, predetermined number of districts is a racial gerrymander subject to strict scrutiny. The precise fraction used as the racial target, and the number of districts it is applied to, are irrelevant.
