Cite as: 517 U. S. 952 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
apartheid" brings to mind is unconstitutional because it emphatically implies the inferiority of one race. See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 494 (1954) ("To separate [minority children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community"). Shaw I, in contrast, vindicated the complaint of a white voter who objected not to segregation but to the particular racial proportions of the district. See Karlan, Our Separatism? Voting Rights as an American Nationalities Policy, 1995 U. Chi. Legal Forum 83, 94 (hereinafter Karlan, Our Separatism) (noting the irony of using the term "apartheid" to describe what are "among the most integrated districts in the country"). Whatever this district may have symbolized, it was not "apartheid." Nor did the proportion of its racial mixture reflect any purpose of racial subjugation, the district in question having been created in an effort to give a racial minority the same opportunity to achieve a measure of political power that voters in general, and white voters and members of ethnic minorities in particular, have enjoyed as a matter of course. In light of a majority-minority district's purpose to allow previously submerged members of racial minorities into the active political process, this use of race cannot plausibly be said to affect any individual or group in any sense comparable to the injury inflicted by de jure segregation. It obviously conveys no message about the inferiority or outsider status of members of the white majority excluded from a district. And because the condition addressed by creating such a district is a function of numbers, the plan implies nothing about the capacity or value of the minority to which it gives the chance of electoral success.
Added to the anomalies of Shaw I 's idea of equal protection injury and the rhetoric of its descriptions, there is a further conceptual inadequacy in Shaw I. Whereas it defines injury as the reinforcement of the notion that members of a racial group will prefer the same candidates at the polls, the imme-
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