I don’t know who Gary Fields is, and I don’t suppose it matters. I assume he’s one of a legion of white leftists who write for the Associated Press and find things to complain about. Fields apparently hit paydirt with an article that appears on all of the corporate media sites in Louisiana this week, whining about how the black community in North Baton Rouge is facing a bleak future for having lost “representation” thanks to the Supreme Court’s Calais decision and the Louisiana legislature’s subsequent decision to draw a congressional map with five Republican seats and one Democrat seat.

If you cross the Mississippi River on the Huey P. Long-O.K. Allen Bridge, pass the Exxon Refinery, then head north for a few minutes, you’ll find a pocket of Louisiana that’s unlike any other place in America’s never-ending battle over what it means to have equal representation.

Here is Scotlandville, which was once its own unincorporated town but is now part of Baton Rouge. It’s a nearly all Black community of 10,000 people that has been, for the second time, shuffled around on the state’s congressional map to make it part of a majority white district. Both times it was during the term of the same representative.

The first time was 1996, when a group of voters sued to redraw the lines. The second time was earlier this year, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a core part of the Voting Rights Act intended to protect minorities’ political rights was unconstitutional.

The ruling led to cascading changes around the American South, but the case originated in Louisiana — specifically the 6th Congressional District that included Scotlandville. This is where Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields, 63, grew up poor and attended local schools before graduating from nearby Southern University A&M, eventually climbing the ranks to the U.S. House.

Now he plans to leave Washington and return to the Legislature instead of running for reelection in a race that he sees little chance of winning because the district boundaries have been altered dramatically. Scotlandville will no longer be represented by a native son, someone who people believed instinctively understood their challenges and offered a direct line to power and influence in the nation’s capital.

“We’re back to where we were right after Reconstruction,” said Press Robinson Sr., 89, who has spent years working on issues involving the congressional map. “When they redistrict, they are not concerned about the effect it has on those of us who are people of color.”

The methods have changed over the years, he said, but the intent has not.

“They disenfranchise people of color and they’ve done it again,” Robinson said.

What a load of crap.

First, let’s understand something: this “poor, underrepresented community” does not have enough population for its own congressional district. The city of Baton Rouge proper, which is around 60 percent black – East Baton Rouge Parish is sort of 50-50, but blacks are slightly less in number than are whites – only has 230,000 people. A congressional district is three quarters of a million people or so. So the population you’re talking about is less than 20 percent of a congressional district.

They aren’t going to get “representation” in Congress, if what you’re trying to say is that it’s only “representation” if their Congressman is Cleo Fields or some other black Democrat from Baton Rouge. Or if they are, then it happens because somebody else is denied “representation.” Fields’ district, after all, stretched all the way up to Shreveport, and some 45 percent of that district’s population was white people who have never, ever felt “represented” by Cleo Fields.

Why is it more important that people in Scotlandville have a congressman who’s black and local than white folks in Avoyelles or St. Landry Parish have somebody from nearby who looks like them?

It turns out that most of North Baton Rouge is going to be represented by somebody who looks like most of them do. Troy Carter is the overwhelming favorite to win the 2nd District congressional race; his district snakes up the Mississippi River from New Orleans so that it picks up the “black” areas of Baton Rouge, or much of them. And this has been the case for most of the last 30 years; to make a majority-black district in Louisiana, you’ve got to combine Orleans and the northern part of East Baton Rouge somehow. To make a second majority-black district you have to make a Rorschach test snaking through the piney woods of North Louisiana looking for pockets of black voters.

Because the black population of Louisiana resides in the state’s cities, none of which are large enough on their own for a congressional district without including the suburbs and therefore making majority-white districts.

And the demand that we do these things is endless, even though it’s been demonstrated again and again that it isn’t possible to draw a map with multiple majority-black districts without it being an obscenely gerrymandered map.

But that part doesn’t bother Gary Fields. What bothers him is that Louisiana’s political majority might actually decide to exercise that majority for its own benefit. Just like Democrats do everywhere they’re able.

It’s the moralistic tint to this which rankles the most…

Fields’ district went from being 53% Black to 25% in the new one. He announced in July that he wasn’t going to run for reelection.

Blocks from the main entrance to Southern University A&M, a small crowd hung around a convenience store, but people were unwilling to talk about politics, eyeing strangers suspiciously. One younger man said he didn’t know who represents the area on the city council, let alone in Congress.

Frank Levy, 56, the cashier, said people’s apathy created the political environment that allowed for gerrymandering to occur again.

“A lot of people don’t even think about politics like this,” he said. “They don’t understand.”

About five minutes away, Dakasha Caulfield Leonard, 48, sat in the chapel of Scott’s Bluff Morticians, a nearly century-old fixture in the business community. Leonard returned two years ago to take over the funeral home when her father, who purchased it in the 1990s, became ill. She is worried about what will happen when Fields is no longer in office.

“The community is small and everybody knows everybody. Cleo is a member of our community,” she said. “If he doesn’t speak up and carry our voices, there’s nobody else to do that for us.”

As if roving death squads are coming to Scotlandville, courtesy of the Republican Party of Louisiana.

The piece concludes with a paean to Fields’ Louisiana Leadership Institute, which is a private think tank/political machine of his that your tax dollars have paid for over the space of decades without any significant benefit to the community.

It’s a breathtaking piece of propaganda disguised as objective journalism.

And they wonder why corporate media is dying.