650
Opinion of the Court
cial harms that are not present in our vote-dilution cases. It therefore warrants different analysis.
Justice Souter apparently believes that racial gerry-mandering is harmless unless it dilutes a racial group's voting strength. See post, at 684 (dissenting opinion). As we have explained, however, reapportionment legislation that cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to classify and separate voters by race injures voters in other ways. It reinforces racial stereotypes and threatens to undermine our system of representative democracy by signaling to elected officials that they represent a particular racial group rather than their constituency as a whole. See supra, at 647-649. Justice Souter does not adequately explain why these harms are not cognizable under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The dissenters make two other arguments that cannot be reconciled with our precedents. First, they suggest that a racial gerrymander of the sort alleged here is functionally equivalent to gerrymanders for nonracial purposes, such as political gerrymanders. See post, at 679 (opinion of Stevens, J.); see also post, at 662-663 (opinion of White, J.). This Court has held political gerrymanders to be justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause. See Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U. S., at 118-127. But nothing in our case law compels the conclusion that racial and political gerrymanders are subject to precisely the same constitutional scrutiny. 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.
Second, Justice Stevens argues that racial gerrymandering poses no constitutional difficulties when district lines are drawn to favor the minority, rather than the majority. See post, at 678 (dissenting opinion). We have made clear, however, that equal protection analysis "is not dependent
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