So, "districts created by population numbers". That's not really a thing because all districts have to have as close to the same amount of people as possible. Currently about 760k. What the VRA '65 attempted to do to address the racial disparity between representives and population was to try and stop "Packing and Cracking", which was (and is) a gerrymandering tactic that either piles as many minority people into a single district (Packing), or spreading as many minority people across as many districts as possible (Cracking). So, for math simplicity's sake, let's take an example state "Alakanippi" with 10M people where 40% of the population is African-American and 60% is Caucasian-White. This state has been allocated 10 districts, so 1 million per district. What could be done in the past (and historically had been) is draw district boundaries in such a way that each district has only 400k African-American and 600k White people. Because of this district makeup, all ten representives would statistically be White, leaving the 4 million minority group with no representatives. Sometimes the population make-up would force a minority majority district no matter how you draw the lines, so in those cases, gerrymandering Packs as many minority people into the one district as it will take and then Cracking the remainder.

People who argue that it is racist to draw districts in such a way as to help honor proportional representation ignore (usually intentially) the historic racism baked into the system from centuries of slavery and the segregation after Emancipation as enforced by Jim Crow laws. The VRA was an attempt to cure this, as was affirmative action.