You’re right, but this whole legal fiction going on is maddening.
The truth is that the GOP wants to draw district maps they think will help the GOP maintain minority rule: it’s about party votes, not skin color. It comes across as being about skin color because the GOP believes they correlate.
Because our electoral laws are written so incompetently, partisan gerrymandering isn’t just legal, it’s expected. So the DNC has to engage the partisan fight the GOP started here on racial grounds because that’s what we made illegal.
The whole thing could be fixed by designing an inherently fair algorithm to automate the districting process, but both the DNC and the GOP will never let that happen. So instead we get this nonsense.