- A proposed majority-minority 10th District would be made from parts of districts currently held by Jim McDermott, Adam Smith, and Dave Reichert
First off, let it be known: I did not draw this map. I know it's somewhat hard to read. And I know the coloring is a bit... blunt.
What it's showing, however, is quite interesting: A proposal that Washington's 10th Congressional District—that's the brand new district we're getting next year because of how fast our state has been growing—be drawn so that it's Washington's first majority-minority Congressional district.
The district's northern end would be Seattle's Union Street, and it would run southward from there, encompassing Burien, Tukwila, Renton, Seatac, Normandy Park, Des Moines, Kent, Federal Way, White Center, Boulevard Park, and Bryn Mawr-Skyway.
Because of the way populations in this region have been shifting as the whole state grows, if you combine all of the above-mentioned places into one district you get an area that's 12 percent African American, 19 percent Asian, 14 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American, 5 percent "other" (we're now at 51 percent minority), and 49 percent white.
George Cheung, spokesman for the United for Fair Representation Coalition, which proposed the district to the Washington State Redistricting Commission, says a new district with these boundaries would cause Washingtonians “to actually have a champion in our Congressional delegation who’s actually going to talk about issues conntected to communities of color." That, Cheung said, would be "incredibly powerful.”
Is Cheung saying that the Congressmen whose current districts would be carved up to create this new one are not champions for "issues connected to communities of color"? (The Congressmen who would lose parts their districts to make this one are Democrat Jim McDermott, Democrat Adam Smith, and Republican Dave Reichert.)
"They’re not necessarily accountable to communities of color," Cheung said, "because communities of color make up such a small percentage of those districts.”
I'll be querying the three Congressmen about this assertion.
