For Equals Only by Botts Tina Fernandes;

Author:Botts, Tina Fernandes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding Reflections

The Supreme Court’s contemporary understanding of the concept of race as a purely biological phenomenon is in direct contrast to contemporary academic thinking on the topic of race, which understands race as a sociocultural/sociohistorical phenomenon. Moreover, the Court’s switch from a sociocultural/sociohistorical (or, in philosophical terms, a social constructionist) concept of race to a purely biological concept of race during the same period of time that the academic concept of race reverses itself in the opposite direction is a curious state of affairs, given that the result is that the Equal Protection Clause, vis-à-vis racial discrimination, has moved from a device to protect racialized Americans to a device that protects primarily nonracialized Americans.

One explanation for this state of affairs is that the appropriation by nonracialized Americans of the usage of the Equal Protection Clause for protection against “racial discrimination” is part of the larger phenomenon of the divestiture of the rights of racialized persons for the benefits of nonracialized persons over time since the end of the civil rights movement. Arguably, were the Court to follow academic wisdom and utilize a sociocultural/sociohistorical concept of race rather than a biological one, it would then have to confront that racial discrimination is not something that happens in a vacuum. It would have to confront that racial discrimination does not mean, as some scholars contend, behaving as if race were important when it isn’t. Instead, racial discrimination is something that occurs in a context in which the vestiges or “badges” of slavery are not a thing of the past, but are perpetuated through policies and laws that treat racialized persons as less “equal” than nonracialized persons. The Supreme Court’s present reliance on a purely biological concept of race at virtually the same point in time as the biological concept of race is dropped from academic legitimacy is therefore both anomalous and disturbing.

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