Whose Map Is It Anyway?

How Invisible Lines Define Our Labor

Pour that coffee. We need to talk about what just happened in Texas.

You’ve probably seen the headlines: lawmakers down there just forced through a new congressional map. In the middle of the decade. This isn’t the normal post-Census redraw; this is a special session, an intentional move. Naturally, the NAACP and LULAC filed lawsuits almost immediately, calling it exactly what it is: a blatant racial gerrymander.

It’s the classic “pack and crack“—shoving as many Black and Latino voters as possible into a few districts (packing them) so they can’t build power, and slicing up the rest of their communities across multiple other districts (cracking them) to dilute their vote into total irrelevance.

This is a political line, drawn on a map with a sharpie, designed to lock in political power.

But it gets me thinking about all the other invisible lines drawn across our lives. Look at the latest August jobs report. Black women’s unemployment is sitting stubbornly high—depending on the analysis, somewhere between 6.7% and 7.5%. Meanwhile, the gap between our unemployment rate and that of white women just widened to a staggering 4.0 percentage points in 2025.

That doesn’t just happen. That is not an accident. That is the direct, calculated result of economic lines drawn generations ago to determine who gets resources, who gets capital, who gets access, and who, by design, does not.

These maps—the political one in Texas and the economic one reflected in that jobs report—are not separate conversations. They are the same tool, wielded in different arenas to achieve the same goal: containment.

But, why?

The answer, surprisingly, appears in the research I’ve been doing for Labor Pains.

I am constantly asked, “Why Albany and Oakland? Why those two cities for the Labor Pains project?”

Honestly, for a while, I’d just fumble through the answer. I’d say something about living in both cities as a head of family, about having these profoundly similar yet wildly different experiences as a Black woman in both places.

But I know now what that was. It was my unconscious brain demanding I figure something out. It was so curious about the contradictions that it apparently needed me to create an entire multi-year archival project just to dissect and unpack it all. (This, by the way, is what I consider a wild Friday night these days.)

It turns out, that curiosity landed on the exact right case studies. Because right now, the post-2020 municipal redistricting battles in Oakland, California, and Albany, New York, show us the two extremes. They are the perfect lesson in the potential and the problem of this entire process.

They show us exactly what’s at stake in that Texas fight.

The Good Faith Effort: Oakland’s Process

Both cities legally had to redraw their local maps after the 2020 Census. You can’t just keep old maps when populations shift; it violates the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Let’s start with Oakland. The city is in total transformation. The population grew by 12.8% (hitting 440,646). But that growth was chaotic and uneven. District 3, for instance, exploded by 25.6%, while District 4 barely grew at 5.9%. This created a total population deviation between districts of 22.4%—far beyond the 10% legal threshold. That is, frankly, bananas. It means your vote in one district was worth demonstrably less than a vote in another.

Add to that a massive racial and ethnic transformation: the proportions of Black and non-Hispanic White residents declined, while the Hispanic/Latino and Asian populations grew significantly. This isn’t just a numbers game; this is a high-stakes recalibration of power, representation, and community.

So, how did Oakland handle it? They used a truly independent, citizen-led commission, much like the California state model. This wasn’t a backroom deal by politicians. Their entire process was legally structured to prioritize “Communities of Interest” (COIs). That’s a fancy term for a simple, revolutionary idea: they actually asked people “Who is your community? Forget the old lines, where do you live, shop, worship, and organize? Where does your neighborhood feel like it begins and ends?”

It was transparent. It was driven by hours and hours of public testimony. It was equitable.

The Opaque Machine: Albany’s Warning

Now, let’s look at Albany. Their population growth was modest (up to 99,224, adjusted to 100,142 when the state finally decided to count incarcerated people at their last-known residence instead of in the prison town, which is a whole other story).

The real issue in Albany was that the existing map was already broken. The wards were wildly out of balance. Ward 12 was nearly 20% over the ideal population size, while Ward 13 was 13% under. It was a system begging for a comprehensive redrawing.

Here’s the critical part: several of Albany’s wards were already majority-minority, primarily Black (Ward 5, for example, was 65.0% Black). This immediately triggers the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This means the city has a federal, legal mandate to draw maps that protect that voting strength. You cannot, by law, dilute it or crack it.

So, how did Albany handle this delicate, legally-mandated process?

Did they create a robust, independent citizen commission like Oakland’s? No. Their local process operated entirely in the shadow of New York State’s disastrous, failed “independent” commission—a commission that imploded into partisan gridlock, got sued, and had its maps thrown out by the courts.

The result for Albany was a new ward map that was just… released. It arrived with virtually no detailed public justification for why the lines were drawn the way they were. And what did those lines show? Suspiciously high concentrations of minority voters crammed into just a few wards.

This is the textbook definition of “packing.” It’s a cynical strategy. You concede one or two districts by packing them with 65% or 70% of one demographic, making that win a foregone conclusion. Why? Because it drains those same voters out of all adjacent, competitive districts, letting you flip those seats with ease. It looks like representation, but it functions as containment. It ensures those “packed” voices can never build a coalition or influence policy outside their single, over-concentrated ward.

Our Liberty is on the Line

This is the whole game. Oakland’s transparent, testimony-driven process built public trust. Albany’s opaque process, operating under a flawed system, created a map vulnerable to every charge of gerrymandering in the book.

These maps dictate everything. They are the invisible lines that determine policy. They determine where resources go, where police are concentrated, which schools get funding, and which neighborhoods get parks versus pavement.

These lines define our labor. They are the 21st-century extension of the old lines, the ones that kept Black women out of so-called “pink collar” jobs, reserving that labor for white women (as Michael Honey noted, p. 87). They are the lines that ensured that the very “survival of Black families depended to a great extent on the labor of Black women” (Honey, p. 86)—labor that was simultaneously essential and systemically devalued.

The tools of takeover being used right now are legislation and force. That Texas map is legislation as a weapon. We are far past the point of giving away any more of our liberty for the sake of some leader’s preferences, or simply because we weren’t paying attention.

This isn’t a theoretical exercise. This Wednesday on the blog, we are shelving the 1930s history and focusing on this moment. We are going to dive deep into the post-2020 maps and talk about the citizen’s responsibility. The Oakland process proves that community input isn’t just a nice idea; it is the only defense. Participation is not optional. We have to be in the room where the map is being drawn.