540
Stevens, J., dissenting
follows that ancestry is always a proxy for race. Cases in which ancestry served as such a proxy are dramatically different from this one. For example, the literacy requirement at issue in Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347 (1915), relied on such a proxy. As part of a series of blatant efforts to exclude blacks from voting, Oklahoma exempted from its literacy requirement people whose ancestors were entitled to vote prior to the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Guinn scheme patently "served only to perpetuate . . . old [racially discriminatory voting] laws and to effect a transparent racial exclusion." Ante, at 513. As in Guinn, the voting laws held invalid under the Fifteenth Amendment in all of the cases cited by the majority were fairly and properly viewed through a specialized lens—a lens honed in specific detail to reveal the realities of time, place, and history behind the voting restrictions being tested.
That lens not only fails to clarify, it fully obscures the realities of this case, virtually the polar opposite of the Fifteenth Amendment cases on which the Court relies. In Terry v. Adams, 345 U. S. 461 (1953), for example, the Court held that the Amendment proscribed the Texas "Jaybird primaries" that used neutral voting qualifications "with a single proviso—Negroes are excluded," id., at 469. Similarly, in Smith v. Allwright, 321 U. S. 649, 664 (1944), it was the blatant "discrimination against Negroes" practiced by a political party that was held to be state action within the meaning of the Amendment. Cases such as these that "strike down these voting systems . . . designed to exclude one racial class (at least) from voting," ante, at 513-514, have no application to a system designed to empower politically the remaining members of a class of once sovereign, indigenous people.
Ancestry surely can be a proxy for race, or a pretext for invidious racial discrimination. But it is simply neither proxy nor pretext here. All of the persons who are eligible to vote for the trustees of OHA share two qualifications that no other person old enough to vote possesses: They are bene-
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