948
Stevens, J., dissenting
Finally, North Carolina's chosen means of avoiding liability will impose none of the burdens on third parties that have made the Court wary of voluntary, race-based state action in the past. No white employees or applicants stand to lose jobs on account of their race as a result of North Carolina's actions. In fact, no white voters risk having their votes unlawfully diluted. At most, North Carolina's chosen means will require that some people of both races will be placed in districts other than those to which they would have otherwise been assigned. Even assuming that "burden" is more onerous when it results from racial considerations, it does not rise to a level of injury that justifies a federal court intruding on the State's discretion to formulate a plan that complies with the Voting Rights Act.
In fact, to the extent that plaintiffs in these cases premise their standing on the "representational" harms that they suffer, see supra, at 927-928, a State's decision to locate a majority-minority district outside the area that suffers from acute, racial bloc voting would seem to diminish the likelihood that representatives in majority-minority districts will serve only the interests of minority voters. After all, a representative of a majority-minority district that does not suffer from racial bloc voting cannot safely ignore the interests of voters of either race. In this respect, the majority's narrow tailoring requirement, by forcing States to remedy perceived § 2 violations only by drawing the district around the area in which the Gingles preconditions have been satisfied, has the perverse consequence of requiring States to inflict the very harm that supposedly renders racial gerry-mandering challenges constitutionally cognizable.22
22 The Court's strict analysis in this case is in some tension with the more reasonable approach endorsed by Justice O'Connor this same day. On her view, state legislatures seeking to comply with the Voting Rights Act clearly possess more freedom to draw majority-minority districts than do federal courts attempting to enforce it. Bush v. Vera, post, at 994 (O'Connor, J., concurring).
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