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Opinion of the Court
are not a necessary predicate to a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Cf. Arlington Heights, supra, at 266, n. 14. In the absence of a pattern as stark as those in Yick Wo or Gomillion, "impact alone is not determinative, and the Court must look to other evidence" of race-based decisionmaking. Arlington Heights, supra, at 266 (footnotes omitted).
Shaw applied these same principles to redistricting. "In some exceptional cases, a reapportionment plan may be so highly irregular that, on its face, it rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to 'segregat[e] . . . voters' on the basis of race." Shaw, supra, at 646-647 (quoting Gomillion, supra, at 341). In other cases, where the district is not so bizarre on its face that it discloses a racial design, the proof will be more "difficul[t]." 509 U. S., at 646. Although it was not necessary in Shaw to consider further the proof required in these more difficult cases, the logical import of our reasoning is that evidence other than a district's bizarre shape can be used to support the claim.
Appellants and some of their amici argue that the Equal Protection Clause's general proscription on race-based decisionmaking does not obtain in the districting context because redistricting by definition involves racial considerations. Underlying their argument are the very stereotypical assumptions the Equal Protection Clause forbids. It is true that redistricting in most cases will implicate a political calculus in which various interests compete for recognition, but it does not follow from this that individuals of the same race share a single political interest. The view that they do is "based on the demeaning notion that members of the defined racial groups ascribe to certain 'minority views' that must be different from those of other citizens," Metro Broadcasting, 497 U. S., at 636 (Kennedy, J., dissenting), the precise use of race as a proxy the Constitution prohibits. Nor can the argument that districting cases are excepted from standard equal protection precepts be resuscitated by United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh, Inc. v. Carey, 430 U. S.
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