514
Opinion of the Court
signed to exclude one racial class (at least) from voting. See Terry, supra, at 469-470; Allwright, supra, at 663-666 (over-ruling Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U. S. 45 (1935)). The Fifteenth Amendment, the Court held, could not be so circumvented: "The Amendment bans racial discrimination in voting by both state and nation. It thus establishes a national policy . . . not to be discriminated against as voters in elections to determine public governmental policies or to select public officials, national, state, or local." Terry, supra, at 467.
Unlike the cited cases, the voting structure now before us is neither subtle nor indirect. It is specific in granting the vote to persons of defined ancestry and to no others. The State maintains this is not a racial category at all but instead a classification limited to those whose ancestors were in Hawaii at a particular time, regardless of their race. Brief for Respondent 38-40. The State points to theories of certain scholars concluding that some inhabitants of Hawaii as of 1778 may have migrated from the Marquesas Islands and the Pacific Northwest, as well as from Tahiti. Id., at 38-39, and n. 15. Furthermore, the State argues, the restriction in its operation excludes a person whose traceable ancestors were exclusively Polynesian if none of those ancestors resided in Hawaii in 1778; and, on the other hand, the vote would be granted to a person who could trace, say, one sixty-fourth of his or her ancestry to a Hawaiian inhabitant on the pivotal date. Ibid. These factors, it is said, mean the restriction is not a racial classification. We reject this line of argument.
Ancestry can be a proxy for race. It is that proxy here. Even if the residents of Hawaii in 1778 had been of more diverse ethnic backgrounds and cultures, it is far from clear that a voting test favoring their descendants would not be a race-based qualification. But that is not this case. For centuries Hawaii was isolated from migration. 1 Kuykendall 3. The inhabitants shared common physical character-
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