Is the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment violated when the explicit basis for the placement of a geographic area in one district over another, exacerbating the population deviation between the two districts, is the racial composition of that area?

During the summer of 2020, the term “BIPOC”— “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”—emerged as the preferred moniker for the theory that all non-white people share certain common experiences as a result of their nonwhiteness. Relying on these supposed shared experiences, the County of San Diego Independent Redistricting Commission intentionally created a coalition-minority supervisorial district to unify the BIPOC community of interest. To do so, the Commission chose to exacerbate the population deviation between two supervisorial districts on the explicit basis that a discrete African American population needed to be included in the BIPOC district. Yet the lower courts held that the Commission’s discussions of creating a BIPOC district did not show that race was the predominant consideration in the design of the district as a whole, and that the far more explicit discussion of the African American population of a discrete geographic area was inadequate to show that race predominated with respect to the design of the BIPOC district as a whole. The question presented is: Is the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment violated when the explicit basis for the placement of a geographic area in one district over another, exacerbating the population deviation between the two districts, is the racial composition of that area?