Quoting Scott Gerber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Discrimination is both illegal and immoral, and it needs to stop. > It's very hard for me to make sense of this position. Obviously, not all discrimination is illegal and immoral. Discrimination based on test scores, or geography, or socioeconomic status, or alumni parentage, is apparently okay. So what is it about racial discrimination that's so bad? It's not, I think, just that it's based on a characteristic people don't choose and can't change--that applies to where your parents went to school, too. So I think we have to look at history to understand why racial classifications are special. In teaching equal protection to my first year con law students, I asked them to imagine an America in which instead of slavery we'd had hereditary caste system based on when your ancestors first arrived in North America, and enforced by laws prohibiting intermarriage between people whose first ancestors didn't arrive in the same quarter century, which was eventually overthrown by a war, following which the equal protection clause was ratified. In such a case, I suggested, alumni preferences would look like a paradigm equal protection violation and racial classifications wouldn't seem as suspicious. So what's the lesson of history? It's possible to say that we fought a civil war over racial discrimination, but I think it's more accurate to say that, to the extent that's what the war was about, it was about oppression implemented via race discrimination. The legacy of oppression taints its tools in our minds, but I would think we should be more concerned with oppression than with its forms. Which is to say, again, it's possible to say that the best reading of the Equal Protection Clause is as mandating colorblindness, but it's certainly not obvious, and it's not convincing to me. I don't think the claim that all discrimination is immoral and illegal resolves this question.
