86.3% of the population in the 18th District was classified as nonwhite or Puerto Rican. WHITE, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BLACKMUN and STEVENS, JJ., joined, post, p. 658. Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society. Thus, "an equal protection violation may be found only where the electoral system substantially disadvantages certain voters in their opportunity to influence the political process effectively." But their loose and imprecise use by today's majority has, I fear, led it astray. In 1993, about 20% of the state population identified as Black. Brief for State Appellees 5, n. 6. Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130, 144 (1976) (WHITE, J., dissenting). These lawmakers are quite aware that the districts they create will have a white or a black majority; and with each new district comes the unavoidable choice as to the racial composition of the district." Court's determination to depart from our prior decisions by carving out this narrow group of cases for strict scrutiny in place of the review customarily applied in cases dealing with discrimination in electoral districting on the basis of race. 75-104, p. 6, n. 6) (emphasis in original). The other part of the majority's explanation of its holding is related to its simultaneous discomfort and fascination with irregularly shaped districts. To that end, however, there must be an allegation of discriminatory purpose and effect, for the constitutionality of a race-conscious redistricting plan. to Juris. It involves, instead, an attempt to equalize treatment, and to provide minority voters with an effective voice in the political process. What appellants object to is redistricting legislation that is so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling justification. Allen v. State Board of Elections(1969) (emphasis added). Regents of Univ. By this, I meant that the group must exhibit "strong indicia of lack of political power and the denial of fair representation," so that it could be said that it has "essentially been shut out of the political process." See, e. g., Holland v. Illinois, 493 U. S. 474, 484, n. 2 (1990) ("[A] prosecutor's assumption that a black juror may be presumed to be partial simply because he is black violates the Equal Protection. Plainly, this variety is not implicated by appellants' allegations and need not detain us further. Thus, if appellants' allegations of a racial gerrymander are not contradicted on remand, the District Court must determine whether the General Assembly's reapportionment plan satisfies strict scrutiny. Katzenbach, Michael R. Cole, Alan E. Kraus, Laughlin McDonald, Kathy Wilde, E. Richard Larson, and Dennis Courtland Hayes; for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., by Elaine R. Jones, Charles Stephen Ralston, and Dayna L. Cunningham; and for Bolley Johnson et al. Shaw v. Reno Jennifer Denise Rogers . 439, as amended, 42 U. S. C. 1973c, the General Assembly passed new legislation creating a second majority-black district. Id., at 133 (emphasis added). Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483; McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U. S. 184. The Twelfth District received even harsher criticism. Laws that explicitly distinguish between individuals on racial grounds fall within the core of that prohibition. Why did four justices in this case dissent from majority opinion? We also do not decide whether appellants' complaint stated a claim under constitutional provisions other than the Fourteenth Amendment. (1986) (teacher layoffs), electoral districting calls for decisions that nearly always require some consideration of race for legitimate reasons where there is a racially mixed population. 7 The Court accuses me of treating the use of race in electoral redistricting as a "benign" form of discrimination. But it soon became apparent that guaranteeing equal access to the polls would not suffice to root out other racially discriminatory voting practices. 20, 1993, p. A4. At least. Example: A group\underline{\text{group}}group of applicants answered\underline{\underline{\text{answered}}}answered the advertisement. In the 1870's, for example, opponents of Reconstruction in Mississippi "concentrated the bulk of the black population in a 'shoestring' Congressional district running the length of the Mississippi River, leaving five others with white majorities." See Rogers v. Lodge, 458 U. S. 613, 624-626 (1982); Chapman v. Meier, 420 U. S. 1, 17 (1975) (requiring proof that "the group has been denied access to the political process equal to the access of other groups").2. UJO, supra, at 148. At some points the district was no wider than Interstate 85, prompting one state legislator to remark that if "you drove down the interstate with both car doors open, you'd kill most of the people in the district." See App. 10 This appears to be what has occurred in this instance. After the General Assembly passed legislation creating the second district, a group of white voters in North Carolina, led by Ruth O. Shaw, sued on the grounds that the district was an unconstitutional gerrymander . That concession is wise: This Court never has held that race-conscious state decisionmaking is impermissible in all circumstances. Ibid. A new issue of 20-year bonds: The flotation costs of the new bonds would be 4% of the proceeds. Accordingly, the Court held that such schemes violate the Fourteenth Amendment when they are adopted with a discriminatory purpose and have the effect of diluting minority voting strength. Pope v. Blue, 809 F. Supp. 2 See Karcher, 462 U. S., at 748 (STEVENS, J., concurring) ("If they serve no purpose other than to favor one segment-whether racial, ethnic, religious, economic, or political-that may occupy a position of strength at a particular point in time, or to disadvantage a politically weak segment of, duty to govern impartially is abused when a group with power over the electoral process defines electoral boundaries solely to enhance its own political strength at the expense of any weaker group. Accord, Washington v. Seattle School Dist. In our view, the court used the wrong analysis. Forty of North Carolina's one hundred counties are covered by 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U. S. C. 1973c, which prohibits a jurisdiction subject to its provisions from implementing changes in a "standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting" without federal authorization, ibid. Increased use of accounts payable financing: Because this financing is part of the companys ongoing daily business, it has no flotation costs, and the company assigns it a cost that is the same as the overall firm WACC. 92-357. As we have said, however, the very reason that the Equal Protection Clause demands strict scrutiny of all racial classifications is because without it, a court cannot determine whether or not the discrimination truly is "benign." v. Bakke, supra, at 305 (opinion of Powell, J.). Id., at 349 (concurring opinion). Today, the Court recognizes a new cause of action under which a State's electoral redistricting plan that includes a configuration "so bizarre" that it "rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to separate voters into different districts on the basis of race [without] sufficient justification" will be subjected to strict scrutiny. The shape of the district at issue in this case is indeed so bizarre that few other examples are ever likely to carry the unequivocal implication of impermissible use of race that the Court finds here. It winds in snakelike fashion through tobacco country, financial centers, and manufacturing areas "until it gobbles in. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, surely, does not stand in the way. Appellants allege that the revised plan, which contains district boundary lines of dramatically irregular shape, consti-. We have rejected such perceptions elsewhere as impermissible racial stereotypes. The Justice Department accepted this revision. of Oral Arg. on the race of those burdened or benefited by a particular classification." Cf. 2 Recognition of actual commonality of interest and racially polarized bloc voting cannot be equated with the "'invocation of race stereotypes'" described by the Court, ante, at 648 (quoting Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U. S. 614, 630-631 (1991)), and forbidden by our case law. by Wayne R. Arden and Jeffrey M. Wice; for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law et al. to Juris. For the following sentence, locate the action verb and underline it twice. Instead, it is the State that must rebut the allegation that race was taken into account, a fact that, together with the legislators' consideration of ethnic, religious, and other group characteristics, I had thought we practically took for granted, see supra, at 660. UJO concerned New York's revision of a reapportionment plan to include additional majority-minority districts in response to the Attorney General's denial of administrative preclearance under 5. They also stated: "'Our argument is that the history of the area demonstrates that there could be-and in fact was-no reason other than race to divide the community at this time.'" See Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S., at 157-158; Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S., at 40. They did not even claim to be white. A reapportionment plan that includes in one district individuals who belong to the same race, but who are otherwise widely separated by geographical and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid. (referring variously to "strict scrutiny," "the standard of review employed in Wygant," and "heightened scrutiny"); id., at 520 (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment) ("strict scrutiny"); id., at 535 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (classifications" 'must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives'" (quoting Regents of Univ. John Paul . 430 U. S., at 167-168 (opinion of WHITE, J., joined by STEVENS and REHNQUIST, JJ.). Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society. In that regard, it closely resembles the present case. Writing for three Members of the Court, I justified this conclusion as follows: "It is true that New York deliberately increased the nonwhite majorities in certain districts in order to enhance the opportunity for election of nonwhite representatives from those districts. 1300 (1966). In Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347 (1915), the Court invalidated under the Fifteenth Amendment a statute that imposed a literacy requirement on voters but contained a "grandfather clause" applicable to individuals and their lineal descendants entitled to vote "on [or prior to] January 1, 1866." As a majority of the Justices construed the complaint, the UJO plaintiffs made a different claim: that the New York plan impermissibly "diluted" their voting strength. Nonetheless, the notion that North Carolina's plan, under which whites remain a voting majority in a disproportionate number of congressional districts, and pursuant to which the State has sent its first black representatives since Reconstruction to the United States Congress, might have violated appellants' constitutional rights is both a fiction and a departure from settled equal protection principles. Shaw appealed. 1994), probable jurisdiction noted 115 . 5. The Equal Protection Clause is only violated when a law seeks to hurt a minority group in voting.t. This problem continues the Draper Consulting situation from previous problems. In their complaint, appellants did not claim that the General Assembly's reapportionment plan unconstitutionally "diluted" white voting strength. Id., at 56 (internal quotation marks omitted); id., at 58 (Harlan, J., concurring); id., at 59-62 (Douglas, J., dissenting). Nothing in the decision precludes white voters (or voters of any other race) from bringing the analytically distinct claim that a reapportionment plan rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race without sufficient justification." As a result of the 1990 census, North Carolina became entitled to a 12th seat in the United States House of Representatives. In the example the verb is answered. Even Justice Whit-. There is thus no theoretical inconsistency in having two distinct approaches to equal protection analysis, one for. The Court held that members of a racial minority group claiming 2 vote dilution through the use of multimember districts must prove three threshold conditions: that the minority group "is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district," that the minority group is "politically cohesive," and that "the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate." Since the holding here makes it unnecessary to decide whether or how a reapportionment plan that, on its face, can be explained in nonracial terms successfully could be challenged, the Court expresses no view on whether the intentional creation of majorityminority districts, without more, always gives rise to an equal protection claim. That it may be difficult to determine from the face of a single-member districting plan that it makes such a distinction does not mean that a racial gerrymander, once established, should receive less scrutiny than other legislation classifying citizens by race. Race in redistricting is permissible as long as configurations are not too extreme, ch 7 part 2 prep pronouns and demonstratives, Christina Dejong, Christopher E. Smith, George F Cole, Government in America: Elections and Updates Edition, George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, Robert L. Lineberry. On the same reasoning, I would affirm the District Court's dismissal of appellants' claim in this instance. In the present case, the facts could sustain no such allegation. In fact, our country's long and persistent history of racial discrimination in voting-as well as our Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, which always has reserved the strictest scrutiny for discrimination on the basis of race, see supra, at 642-644-would seem to compel the opposite conclusion. Three Justices rejected the plaintiffs' claim on the grounds that the New York statute "represented no racial slur or stigma with respect to whites or any other race" and left white voters with better than proportional representation. 2 It should be noted that 2 of the Voting Rights Act forbids any State to impose specified devices or procedures that result in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color. Because the holding is limited to such anomalous circumstances, it perhaps will not substantially hamper a State's legitimate efforts to redistrict in favor of racial minorities. of Ed., 476 U. S. 267 (1986) (teacher layoffs), electoral districting calls for decisions that nearly always require some consideration of race for legitimate reasons where there is a racially mixed population. v. Feeney, 442 U. S. 256, 272 (1979). A state must prove a compelling interest in order to survive a legal challenge to the redistricting plan. See ante, at 642-643. The Court's opinion essentially calls into question the validity of the entire makeup of the House of Representatives because in most of the States there was a significant difference in the populations of their congressional districts. An attorney on behalf of North Carolina argued that the general assembly had created the second district in an attempt to better comply with requests from the Attorney General in accordance with the Voting Rights Act. Croson, supra, at 493 (plurality opinion); UJO, supra, at 173 (Brennan, J., concurring in part) ("[E]ven in the pursuit of remedial objectives, an explicit policy of assignment by race may serve to stimulate our society's latent race consciousness, suggesting the utility and propriety of basing decisions on a factor that ideally bears no relationship to an individual's worth or needs"). Action verbs tell what the subject is doing or what is being done to the subject. See Wright v. Rockefeller, 211 F. Supp. In other words, the purposeful creation of a majority-minority district could have discriminatory effect if it is achieved by means of "packing"-i. e., overconcentration of minority voters. Congress, too, responded to the problem of vote dilution. Section 2 also provides that a violation of that prohibition "is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election are not equally open to participation by members of a [protected] class in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." 808 F. Supp. Id., at 349. by Herbert Wachtell, William H. Brown III, Thomas J. Henderson, Frank R. Parker, Brenda Wright, Nicholas DeB. 9 The Court says its new cause of action is justified by what I understand to be some ingredients of stigmatic harm, see ante, at 647-648, and by a "threa[t] to our system of representative democracy," ante, at 650, both caused by the mere adoption of a districting plan with the elements I have described in the text, supra, at 685. One state legislator has remarked that" '[i]f you drove down the interstate with both car doors open, you'd kill most of the people in the district.'" of Elections, 393 U. S. 544, 569 (1969) (emphasis added). But it did not purport to overrule Gomillion or Wright. Instead, the Court creates a new "analytically distinct," ibid., cause of action, the principal element of which is that a districting plan be "so bizarre on its face," ante, at 644, or "irrational on its face," ante, at 652, or "extremely irregular on its face," ante, at 642, that it "rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race without sufficient justification," ante, at 652. Every Member of the Court assumed that the plaintiffs' allegation that the statute "segregate[d] eligible voters by race and place of origin" stated a constitutional claim. We also do not decide. The Court today chooses not to overrule, but rather to sidestep, UJO. Const., Arndt. In light of this background, it strains credulity to suggest that North Carolina's purpose in creating a second majorityminority district was to discriminate against members of the majority group by "impair[ing] or burden[ing their] opportunity to participate in the political process." Supp., at 472-473. 1973. or benefit provided to others.4 All citizens may register, vote, and be represented. If it is permissible to draw boundaries to provide adequate representation for rural voters, for union members, for Hasidic Jews, for Polish Americans, or for Republicans, it necessarily follows that it is permissible to do the same thing for members of the very minority group whose history in the United States gave birth to the Equal Protection Clause. 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