928
Stevens, J., dissenting
861 F. Supp., at 424-425, 471, n. 59. Given our general reluctance to hear claims founded on speculative assertions of injury, I do not understand why the majority concludes that the speculative possibility that race-based districting "may" cause these plaintiffs to receive less than complete representation suffices to create a cognizable case or controversy. United States v. Hays, 515 U. S., at 745.
If under Hays the so-called "stigmatic" harms which result from extreme race-based districting suffice to secure standing, then I fail to see why it matters whether the litigants live within the "gerrymandered" district or were placed in a district as a result of their race. As I have pointed out, all voters in North Carolina would seem to be equally affected by the messages of "balkanization" or "racial apartheid" that racially gerrymandered maps supposedly convey, cf. Davis, 478 U. S., at 153 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment).
Even if race-based districting could be said to impose more personal harms than the so-called "stigmatic" harms that Hays itself identified, I do not understand why any voter's reputation or dignity should be presumed to have been harmed simply because he resides in a highly integrated, majority-minority voting district that the legislature has deliberately created. Certainly the background social facts are not such that we should presume that the "stigmatic harm" described in Hays and Shaw I amounts to that found cognizable under the Equal Protection Clause in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 495 (1954), where state-sponsored school segregation caused some students, but not others, to be stamped with a badge of inferiority on account of their race. See Shaw I, 509 U. S., at 682, n. 4 (Souter, J., dissenting).
In sum, even if it could be assumed that the plaintiffs in
this case asserted the personalized injuries recognized in Hays at the time of Shaw I by virtue of their bare allegations of racial gerrymandering, they have surely failed to prove
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