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.

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?

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?