Sinkfield v. Kelley, 531 U.S. 28, 3 (2000) (per curiam)

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30

SINKFIELD v. KELLEY

Per Curiam

at 746. But we concluded that the appellees had not shown a cognizable injury under the Fourteenth Amendment because they did not reside in the majority-minority district and had not otherwise shown that they had "personally been denied equal treatment." Id., at 744-746 (internal quotation marks omitted). The appellees' failure to show the requisite injury, we noted, was not changed by the fact that the racial composition of their own district might have been different had the legislature drawn the adjacent majority-minority district another way. Id., at 746.

Appellees' position here is essentially indistinguishable from that of the appellees in Hays. Appellees are challenging their own majority-white districts as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering under a redistricting plan whose purpose was the creation of majority-minority districts, some of which border appellees' districts. Like the appellees in Hays, they have neither alleged nor produced any evidence that any of them was assigned to his or her district as a direct result of having "personally been subjected to a racial classification." Id., at 745; see also Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 904 (1996). Rather, appellees suggest that they are entitled to a presumption of injury-in-fact because the bizarre shapes of their districts reveal that the districts were the product of an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 120a, 148a, 153a.

The shapes of appellees' districts, however, were necessarily influenced by the shapes of the majority-minority districts upon which they border, and appellees have produced no evidence that anything other than the deliberate creation of those majority-minority districts is responsible for the districting lines of which they complain. Appellees' suggestion thus boils down to the claim that an unconstitutional use of race in drawing the boundaries of majority-minority districts necessarily involves an unconstitutional use of race in drawing the boundaries of neighboring majority-white

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