In the same vein, redlining wasn't targeting racial minorities per se, it was just targeting things that correlated with it highly. Under current civil rights legislation that is still highly illegal; gender-ish policy is still an explicit policy considering gendered things.
> "A recipient’s express or admitted use of a classification based on race, color, or national origin establishes intent without regard to the decision-makers’ animus or ultimate objective. Such classifications demonstrate a discriminatory purpose as a matter of law. See Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 904–05 (1995); see also Wittmer v. Peters, 904 F. Supp. 845, 849–50 (C.D. Ill. 1995), aff’d, 87 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 1996). “Put another way, direct evidence of intent is ‘supplied by the policy itself.’” Hassan v. City of New York, 804 F.3d. 277, 295 (3d Cir. 2015) (quoting Massarsky v. Gen. Motors Corp., 706 F.2d 111, 128 (3d Cir.1983) (Sloviter, J., dissenting)).
Where a plaintiff demonstrates, or an agency determines, that a challenged policy overtly and expressly singles out a protected group for disparate treatment, “a plaintiff need not prove the malice or discriminatory animus of a defendant ….” Bangerter v. Orem City Corp., 46 F.3d 1491, 1501 (10th Cir. 1995); see also Ferrill v. Parker Grp., Inc., 168 F.3d 468, 473 n.7 (11th Cir. 1999) (“[I]ll will, enmity, or hostility are not prerequisites of intentional discrimination.”). Rather, the focus is on the “explicit terms of the discrimination,” Int’l Union, United Auto. Aerospace & Agric. Implement Workers of Am. v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187, 199 (1991); that is, how the recipient’s actions specifically deprived or otherwise adversely affected the individual or individuals of access to a federally funded program or benefit. Even benign motivations for racial classifications are presumptively invalid and trigger strict scrutiny in Equal Protection Clause and Title VI cases. Adarand, 515 U.S. at 223–24 (1995); Grutter, 539 U.S. at 326" [1]
The Civil Rights Act outlines protected classes from discrimination. I don't really see the argument against the government taking action against disparate impact in such situations.
After all, the point of the CRA is to remove discriminatory situations. Much like a firefighter trying to stop a fire, whether intent is there is beside the point. The objective is to fix the problem.
Though I don't really know whether what's mentioned in the article is really a case warranting action. The harm applied here seems pretty minor (no assigned seating).
That might be the sole legal priciple, but it's not the sole reason such laws are passed. Plus I don't think it invalidates the GPs concern. Any law that gives people an advantage or disadvantage because of their race is racist. Some feel the benefits are worth it, but explicitly racist laws are anathema to many.
Intent is often irrelevant. If something is shown to have disparate impact on a protected class then it is likely to be ruled discriminatory, and therefore illegal, regardless of intent.
Importantly, though, intent isn't required to make a discrimination claim under the Civil Rights Act. If a policy is apparently neutral, but it has a disproportionally negative impact on a protected class, it is illegal:
> I'm of the impression that a law may not disproportionately target one race or another (it's insufficient to show that a law doesn't explicitly target one race; it must also be shown that it doesn't cause disproportionate harm to one race),
You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.
Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)
To require a transaction would mean you can discriminate based on anything and everything. Exclude black people from entering your store? no problem because they haven't bought anything.
That's so obviously wrong and exactly what civil rights legislation was created to address, that I feel like the lower courts made a big mistake and this should have never reached the SC. There's nothing surprising in the CA SC ruling.. I'm surprised Harvard Law Review decided to write an article on it.
People are still being excluded because of their race, it doesn't matter if you changed the rules once that exclusion was locked in or not. That's a bait and switch justification.
Fair enough, I guess I was referring to legal entities acting in outwardly racist ways as racism. I should have been more specific. I am aware most of the protected class laws had some kind of exception.
I'm aware of the specificity of the ruling but the basis on which the ruling was made is much more general. Depending on the entity different laws would be in question; a fully private entity would probably be violating the civil rights act of 1964, while in the case of university admissions and funding the current systems are still in violation of the equal protection clause. Interpretations of the civil rights act of 1964 that advantage groups for no reason other than race are also unconstitutional.
Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation. Instead substitute it for socioeconomic background.
I'm not sure yet how to fully clarify this, so consider the Missouri government's statutory commitment to spend X% of the budget with women or minority owned businesses. In a degenerate case this means e.g. even the most unqualified candidate could be awarded a contract solely on the basis of race, violating the equal protection clause.
(Practically this expenditure law means larger companies have "independent" women and minority owned businesses as subcontractors who might contract the work back to a business owned by the larger company that can do the work.)
The law that was struck down lumps everyone who isn’t a straight white male into the same category. At least as to race, the majority of non-whites are immigrants or children of immigrants, so immigration recency is an important factor that laws like this fail to consider.
Moreover, the category of “white” is deceptive. I suspect that corporate boards have few people of Appalachian descent, and many people of New England Puritan descent. Understanding what causes that disparity would probably reveal structural mechanisms that affect other groups as well.
> why pro-diversity hiring policies are not necessarily racist
Supreme court has also ruled that opposing them because they are racist is also not racist.
> It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding—the correct understanding—of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did not simultaneously offend it.
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