244
Stevens, J., dissenting
To illustrate the point, consider our cases addressing the Federal Government's discrimination against Japanese-Americans during World War II, Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81 (1943), and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). The discrimination at issue in those cases was invidious because the Government imposed special burdens—a curfew and exclusion from certain areas on the West Coast 2—on the members of a minority class defined by racial and ethnic characteristics. Members of the same racially defined class exhibited exceptional heroism in the service of our country during that war. Now suppose Congress decided to reward that service with a federal program that gave all Japanese-American veterans an extraordinary preference in Government employment. Cf. Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U. S. 256 (1979). If Congress had done so, the same racial characteristics that motivated the discriminatory burdens in Hirabayashi and Korematsu would have defined the preferred class of veterans. Nevertheless, "consistency" surely would not require us to describe the incidental burden on everyone else in the country as "odious" or "invidious" as those terms were used in those cases. We should reject a concept of "consistency" that would view the special preferences that the National Government has provided to Native Americans since 1834 3
skew the analysis and place well-crafted benign programs at unnecessary risk.
2 These were, of course, neither the sole nor the most shameful burdens the Government imposed on Japanese-Americans during that War. They were, however, the only such burdens this Court had occasion to address in Hirabayashi and Korematsu. See Korematsu, 323 U. S., at 223 ("Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers . . . we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order").
3 See Morton v. Mancari, 417 U. S. 535, 541 (1974). To be eligible for the preference in 1974, an individual had to " 'be one fourth or more degree Indian blood and be a member of a Federally-recognized tribe.' " Id., at 553, n. 24, quoting 44 BIAM 335, 3.1 (1972). We concluded that the classi-
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