Cite as: 509 U. S. 630 (1993)
Syllabus
(a) The District Court properly dismissed the claims against the federal appellees. Appellants' racial gerrymandering claims must be examined against the backdrop of this country's long history of racial discrimination in voting. Pp. 639-642. (b) Classifications of citizens based solely on race are by their nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality, because they threaten to stigmatize persons by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility. Thus, state legislation that expressly distinguishes among citizens on account of race—whether it contains an explicit distinction or is "unexplainable on grounds other than race," Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 266—must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest. See, e. g., Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Ed., 476 U. S. 267, 277-278 (plurality opinion). Redistricting legislation that is alleged to be so bizarre on its face that it is unexplainable on grounds other than race demands the same close scrutiny, regardless of the motivations underlying its adoption. See, e. g., Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 341. 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. By perpetuating stereotypical notions about members of the same racial group—that they think alike, share the same political interests, and prefer the same candidates—a racial gerry-mander may exacerbate the very patterns of racial bloc voting that majority-minority districting is sometimes said to counteract. It also sends to elected representatives the message that their primary obligation is to represent only that group's members, rather than their constituency as a whole. 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 majority-minority districts, without more, always gives rise to an equal protection claim. Pp. 642-649. (c) The classification of citizens by race threatens special harms that are not present in this Court's vote-dilution cases and thus warrants an analysis different from that used in assessing the validity of at-large and multimember gerrymandering schemes. In addition, nothing in the Court's decisions compels the conclusion that racial and political gerrymanders are subject to the same constitutional scrutiny; in fact, this country's long and persistent history of racial discrimination in voting and the Court's Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence would seem to compel the opposite conclusion. Nor is there any support for the
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