Moving Beyond Civil Rights

By RICHARD THOMPSON FORD
NYT

Stanford, Calif.

CIVIL rights have transformed American society, and made it fairer and less divided, by outlawing overt racial discrimination and making bigotry socially unacceptable. That success has inspired a host of social groups to press for new civil rights.

But civil rights have barely made a dent in today’s most severe and persistent social injustices, such as the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans, the glass ceiling that blocks career advancement for many women and high unemployment among the elderly; in fact, some of these problems have gotten worse despite civil rights laws intended to address them. Today’s most pressing injustices require comprehensive changes in the practices of the police, schools and employers — not simply responses to individual injuries.

It’s tempting to insist that we simply need more of what has worked in the past: more civil rights laws and more lawsuits. Today, Americans think of almost every social injustice as a civil rights issue. The result has been an explosion of new claims; for instance, the number of lawsuits alleging employment discrimination almost tripled between 1991 and 2000. As civil rights have been reshaped in the attempt to serve so many diverse ends, they have become almost infinitely plastic. Consequently, today civil rights are as likely to undermine equality as they are to further it.

The most striking example of civil rights gone wrong is the repudiation of school integration: in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Equal Protection Clause was read to require desegregation, while in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) it was turned around to prohibit efforts to achieve integration.

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