744
Opinion of the Court
personally denied equal treatment' by the challenged discriminatory conduct." 468 U. S., at 755 (quoting Heckler v. Mathews, 465 U. S. 728, 740 (1984)); see also Valley Forge Christian College, supra, at 489-490, n. 26 (disapproving the proposition that every citizen has "standing to challenge every affirmative-action program on the basis of a personal right to a government that does not deny equal protection of the laws"). We therefore reject appellees' position that "anybody in the State has a claim," Tr. of Oral Arg. 36, and adhere instead to the principles outlined above.
We discussed the harms caused by racial classifications in Shaw. We noted that, in general, "[t]hey threaten to stigmatize individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility." 509 U. S., at 643. We also noted "representational harms" the particular type of racial classification at issue in Shaw may cause: "When a district obviously is created solely to effectuate the perceived common interests of one racial group, elected officials are more likely to believe that their primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole." Id., at 648. Accordingly, we held that "redistricting legislation that is so bizarre on its face that it is 'unexplainable on grounds other than race' demands the same close scrutiny that we give other state laws that classify citizens by race." Id., at 644 (citation omitted). Any citizen able to demonstrate that he or she, personally, has been injured by that kind of racial classification has standing to challenge the classification in federal court.
Demonstrating the individualized harm our standing doctrine requires may not be easy in the racial gerrymandering context, as it will frequently be difficult to discern why a particular citizen was put in one district or another. See id., at 646 (noting "the difficulty of determining from the face of a single-member districting plan that it purposefully distinguishes between voters on the basis of race"). Where a
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