1050
Souter, J., dissenting
A
Accordingly, before Shaw I, the Court required evidence of substantial harm to an identifiable group of voters to justify any judicial displacement of these traditional districting principles. Such evidence existed in Reynolds v. Sims, supra, when the disparate weighting of votes was held unconstitutional, and it was present again when the Court recognized the unconstitutional consequences of vote dilution, see Whitcomb v. Chavis, 403 U. S. 124 (1971); White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755 (1973). In the one case, the harm was mathematically identifiable; in the other, the arithmetic provided powerful circumstantial evidence of the impossibility of political success for the chosen candidate of a racial and numerical minority in an area with pervasive racial-bloc voting. In both cases, the complainants were from an easily identified group of voters; and even in cases of racial vote-dilution claims, which were conceptually more difficult to state than the principle of one person, one vote, there were readily recognized examples of the harm in question. Indeed, even when one acknowledged that voters would be served by a representative not of their own race and that the Constitution guaranteed no right to pick a winner, see Whitcomb, supra, at 153-155, it was impossible to see mere happenstance in the facts that the American voting-age population was 10.5% black, but the Congress that assembled in 1981 had only 17 black representatives out of 435 and no black senator. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982-83, p. 490 (103d ed. 1982) (Table 802); Black Americans: A Statistical Sourcebook 142 (L. Hornor ed. 1995) (Table 4.02); see also Parker, The Damaging Consequences of the Rehnquist Court's Commitment to Color-Blindness Versus Racial Justice, 45 Am. U. L. Rev. 763, 770-771 (1996) (observing that "[p]rior to the latest round of redistricting after the 1990 Census, . . . [b]lacks, who constitute 11.1% of the nation's voting age population, made up only 4.9% of the members of Congress"). The conclusion was inescapable that what we
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