Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law by Randall Kennedy

Author:Randall Kennedy [Kennedy, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90738-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

HISTORY

The single most widely cited statement associated with the idea of color blindness is a declaration by Justice John Marshall Harlan:

In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the Constitution of the United States does not … permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights.…There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.4

Harlan made this statement in 1896 in dissenting from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that required passengers of different races to occupy “equal but separate” cars on intrastate trains. The Court concluded that the compulsory racial separation was reasonable in light of custom and public opinion. Harlan, by contrast, saw the law as a stigmatizing brand inflicted on Negroes.

Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by … white persons.…What can more certainly arouse race hate, what can more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in the public coaches occupied by white citizens?5

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