1036
Stevens, J., dissenting
intentionally or accidentally drawn, while white voters can be placed into districts as bizarre as the State desires.
The great irony, of course, is that by requiring the State to place the majority-minority district in a particular place and with a particular shape, the district may stand out as a stark, placid island in a sea of oddly shaped majority-white neighbors. See Karlan, Still Hazy After All These Years: Voting Rights in the Post-Shaw Era, 26 Cumberland L. Rev. 287, 309 (1995-1996). The inviolable sanctity of the § 2-eligible districts will signal in a manner more blatant than the most egregious of these racial gerrymanders that "a minority community sits here: Interfere with it not." The Court-imposed barriers limiting the shape of the district will interfere more directly with the ability of minority voters to participate in the political process than did the oddly shaped districts that the Court has struck down in recent cases. Unaffected by the new racial jurisprudence, majority-white communities will be able to participate in the districting process by requesting that they be placed into certain districts, divided between districts in an effort to maximize representation, or grouped with more distant communities that might nonetheless match their interests better than communities next door. By contrast, none of this political maneuvering will be permissible for majority-minority districts, thereby segregating and balkanizing them far more effectively than the districts at issue here, in which they were manipulated in the political process as easily as white voters. This result, it seems to me, involves "discrimination" in a far more concrete manner than did the odd shapes that so offended the Court's sensibilities in Miller, Shaw II, and these cases.
In light of this Court's recent work extolling the importance of state sovereignty in our federal scheme, cf. Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, ante, p. 44, I would have expected the Court's sensibilities to steer a course rather more deferential to the States than the one that it charts with its
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