Reverse Discrimination Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Whole classes of people within their own states have historically been marginalized, treated as second-class citizens, or even enslaved—as in the United States. Rectifying past wrongs inevitably brings accusations of reverse discrimination, a charge in the United States leveled against public and private remedies to undo the remnants and relics of past officially sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination. The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared unconstitutional public schools racially segregated by law (de jure, as opposed to de facto). After years of resistance to judicial desegregation orders following Brown, the Supreme Court defined desegregation as integration of previously segregated school systems, which began the contentious process of busing schoolchildren into and out of the mostly black and mostly white residential areas to achieve racially integrated public school systems. Underlying the judicial decree was an assumption supported by considerable evidence that but for long-standing official segregation policies, public school systems and residential neighborhoods would have been naturally more racially integrated. Education was only one facet of entrenched racial inequity in the United States. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had launched the separate but equal doctrine that permitted segregation and embedded in the American social order legalized racism and its appalling consequences that might have been eliminated much sooner had the court ruled differently. Instead, in law, medicine, education, and industry few African Americans were included, and much of the black community had been forced to lag far behind as the rest of the nation developed. America, of course, is not unique.

Remedies in the United States came at first by judicial decree, and Congress followed by successfully passing historic and comprehensive legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) that prohibited discrimination in education and the workplace based on classifications such as race, religion, national origin, and gender. Stopping discrimination was one thing, but correcting past inequities through affirmative action spawned controversy and sharp political divisions. Critics complained that this was reverse discrimination against innocent whites. However, doing nothing except terminating discrimination kept generations of once excluded sectors of American society stages behind white men on nearly every measure of social achievement. On the other hand, given limited resources and opportunities, affirmative action to correct past wrongs could disadvantage a current generation of whites—especially men—who bore no responsibility for the official unfairness that had preceded them. Hence the social, political, and legal dilemma still in search of an equitable resolution, with decision makers treading a thin line between affirmative action and reverse discrimination.

For more than thirty years, the Supreme Court has interpreted both the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act many times to guide decision makers on how lawfully to confront this dilemma, but the justices have been as divided as everyone else. In two major admissions cases in 2003 from the University of Michigan regarding law school and undergraduate admissions, the court, deeply split, indicated that raw quotas, or using race as a decisive or automatic factor, violates the principle of equality. Michigan’s undergraduate admissions program had assigned fixed points to minority applicants, and this was unconstitutional. The law school process survived because race was just one general factor in what the university claimed was a complex, individualized review process designed to obtain a critical mass of diversity among the student body.

In 2009, an equally divided court invalidated New Haven, Connecticut’s, refusal to certify test results it had given to the city’s firefighters. The test and the city’s promotion rules yielded results such that none of the eight blacks who had taken the test (three of whom had passed) would have been promoted. The city’s decision was based on fear of a lawsuit under the disparate-treatment provision of the Civil Rights Act that established grounds for legal challenge of hiring and promotion standards in the workplace. The court ruled that because the city’s own hearings produced no strong evidence of a disparate-impact violation, New Haven could not ignore the test “solely on the racial disparity in the results.”

Unintentional discriminatory effects or impact are not the legal responsibility of government. In fact, if decision makers tried to adjust the scales or to reset standards to benefit minorities at the expense of whites, government risks violating the principles of equality enshrined in both the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. Although a great deal of progress has been made in the second half of the twentieth century, the legal, social, and political problems of inequities regarding gender and race (as well as other classifications) still linger. As the personnel of the judiciary changes, so will its attempts to resolve these problems.

Bibliography:

Anderson,Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003).
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
Kellough, Edward. Understanding Affirmative Action: Politics, Discrimination, and the Search for Justice. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006.

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