The Color-Blind ConstitutionHarvard University Press, 2009 - 314 páginas From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost. Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable. In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance. |
Contenido
A Glorious Liberty Document | 7 |
The Lynn Petition | 22 |
Sumner and Shaw | 40 |
The Reconstruction Amendments of Wendell Phillips | 53 |
The Thirtyninth Congress | 67 |
The Judicial Assessment | 88 |
Plessy v Ferguson | 113 |
Separate but Equal | 131 |
Brown v Board of Education | 151 |
The Road Not Taken | 164 |
Benign Racial Sorting | 182 |
Notes | 227 |
291 | |
294 | |
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Términos y frases comunes
abolitionist account of race affirmative action American Anti-Slavery American Anti-Slavery Society Anti-Slavery Society antidiscrimination argued authority basis Bingham Blaine Amendment Board of Educ Boston brief Brown Chief Justice Civil Rights Act color-blind Constitution colored children constitutional amendment constitutional law constitutionality County decision denied desegregation dissenting district Dred Scott enforce equal protection clause federal Fourteenth Amendment guarantee Harlan's inequality issue judges judicial legislation legislature Liberator Lynn Massachusetts means ment minority National Anti-Slavery Standard opinion persons petition plaintiffs Plessy political principle privileges prohibited proposed public schools pupils question race or color racial classifications racial discrimination racial distinctions racial segregation radical reasonable Reconstruction Amendments Republican rule of nondiscrimination School Committee school segregation segregated schools Senate separate but equal separate schools slave slavery southern statute Stevens Sumner supra note Supreme Court Thirty-ninth Congress tion Tourgée treatment unconstitutional United Voting Rights Act Wendell Phillips
Referencias a este libro
The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier Maria P. P. Root Vista previa limitada - 1996 |
Representation in Crisis: The Constitution, Interest Groups, and Political ... David K. Ryden Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |