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618 Thought-provoking Discrimination Essay Ideas & Examples

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Discrimination essays are an essential part of historical and social sciences because of the influence of the practice on past and current humanity. In this article we will reveal the brief lookback to the history of discrimination and its causes, and provide a list of discrimination topics for essay, as well as paper examples on gender, disability, and racial inequality.

Past practices such as slavery were a result of discriminatory racist beliefs, and it took a long time for African Americans to be acknowledged as equal under law to other races.

Even then, the school of thought was not eradicated, and ethnic minorities as well as women would be oppressed by segregation and unequal opportunities until the emergence of the civil rights movement in the second half of the 20th century.

Even today, discriminatory practices arguably continue, and the debate around their existence draws considerable attention. You can use any of these topics to write an outstanding essay by following the guidelines below.

Discussions of slavery as a form of discrimination will usually be historic in nature, as they will discuss the practice as applied in the United States and other countries in the same region, but the notion offers discrimination essay topics for periods including modernity.

Before the Civil War, many people believed that black people were inferior to whites in some way, possibly due to the disparity between the advancement of African and European civilizations.

As such, even free black people would undergo harassment and risk being enslaved again if they did not leave for a territory that did not have the practice. The topic has been well researched, and so you can and should the wealth of information available to paint an accurate picture.

Even after the abolition of slavery, discriminatory views and practices persisted in many places. Examples included segregation practices where black people would be confined to ghettos and not allowed to visit various institutions.

The civil rights movement arose in the 1960s aimed to right that injustice, but eventually expanded to encompass more marginalized groups, such as women. Gender bias was prevalent at the time, with women being seen as housewives who could not work as well as men.

The success of the feminist message changed that perception and enabled women to choose their life freely. The various efforts and successes of the movement can provide you with ideas for an interesting work.

Ultimately, discrimination is being called out to this day, though many people hold the opinion that it has been mostly or completely eliminated in most advanced countries.

Nevertheless, many modern industries are affected by claims of faults such as gender discrimination, expressed as phenomena such as disproportionate hiring of males or a disparity in earnings between the sexes.

Other instances of modern discrimination are more concrete, such as the severe punishments for homosexuality practiced in some Muslim countries to this day. Humanity is still not entirely equal, and to progress towards that goal, we must identify and address issues.

Here are some additional tips that will improve the general quality of your essay:

• Surround your discrimination essay body with an introduction and a conclusion. The former describes the topic and provides the reader with a thesis that names the central idea of the essay. The latter sums up the essay and provides some closing words.
• Separate different sections of your paper with titles that identify their topics. This practice improves the essay’s structure and appearance, making it easier for the reader to navigate it, especially if you use well-designed discrimination essay titles.

Find excellent discrimination essay examples and other useful samples for your work on IvyPanda!

• The Challenges of Racism Influential for the Life of Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama However, Douglass became an influential anti-slavery and human rights activist because in the early childhood he learnt the power of education to fight inequality with the help of his literary and public speaking skills to […]
• Causes of Discrimination in Society The main causes of discrimination are racial prejudices, gender, national and religious stereotypes, social categorization, and sexual orientation. Racial profiling is one of the vivid examples of racial discrimination and racial prejudices.
• Was Ernest Hemingway a Misogynist? A Sexism Hemingway does not hide the uselessness of Wilson in the eyes of Margot; she only uses him as a toy, and even after they have sex Hemingway still questions it.
• A Personal Experience of Discrimination It was then that I experience ostracism and discrimination in the hands of the joyous Parisians. My friends had always praised the shopping district in Paris and I finally had a chance to witness the […]
• BMW Group’s Pricing Strategy and Discrimination Therefore, the company makes use of this strategy to leverage its products in the market. This strategy is commonly used before the launch of a new product.
• Bipolar Disorder in the Muslim and Discrimination of People With This Mental Illness However, the largest proportion of Muslims believes that there is a significant association of mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and evil spirits.
• Essay on Social Class Inequality & Discrimination In this paper, I analyze three articles on social class and inequality to find out whether the authors’ views agree with mine on the negative attitudes towards the poor by the middle class and the […]
• Maya Angelou: Racism and Segregation in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” An example is that, as she fails to recite her poem in church, she notes that her dress is probably a handout from a white woman.
• Discrimination Causes, Effects and Types As shown in the above definition, discrimination is unjust because it involves classifying a given group of people based on characteristics that make them look unfit to be part of the rest of the group.
• Racial Discrimination in “A Raisin in the Sun” Racial discrimination is the main theme of the book, strongly reflecting the situation that prevailed during the 1950s in the United States, a time when the story’s Younger family lived in Chicago’s South Side ghetto.
• Age Discrimination at the Workplace The first step to preventing age discrimination in a company is for the management to understand the meaning of age discrimination and its effects on the company.
• Racism and Motherhood Themes in Grimke’s “Rachel” In addition, her mother kept the cause of the deaths of Rachel’s father and brother secret. In essence, the play Rachel is educative and addresses some of the challenges people face in society.
• Racism and Discrimination as Social Constructs This is because the concept of race has a negative connotation in the society. For example in some societies, especially the western society; the concept of race implies un-fair treatment and discrimination of a particular […]
• Discrimination in School Based on the data in this case, describe the behaviour of the students in this class The children’s behaviour displays racial discrimination owing to their treatment of the new coloured student in class.
• Discrimination in Education and Unfair Admission The significance of equality in education is due to the natural development of society and the transition to a civilized order, where any manifestations of bias for various reasons are unacceptable.
• Prejudice and Discrimination Among Students The goal of this study is to investigate the peculiarities of prejudicial and discriminatory treatment among students and explain their correlation with anxiety and depression.
• Sexism, Racism, Ableism, Ageism, Classism The absurdity and blatant sexism of this issue made me angry at how the United States is unable to resolve and overcome the lack of gender equality.
• Sociology: Prejudice and Discrimination in India The Dalits and the Adivasis and other classes of Indian Society are pursuing the erasure of the age old caste system with the new Indian socialist revolution.
• Anti-discrimination Legislation Under the provisions of the sexual discrimination Act, a person who displays any behavior that is deemed to be sexually harassing in a nature will be held responsible for their behavior.
• Discrimination of Black Women During Pregnancy To sum up, some data show that there are prominent healthcare disparities among black women and white women during the carriage and delivery of a child.
• Coca-Cola Discrimination Issues Therefore, the essay discusses the discrimination issues raised by four African-Americans that led to a lawsuit, examines actions that would have prevented or minimized the lawsuit, and considers the company’s structural and human resource perspectives […]
• Racial Discrimination Effects in Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody The vivid description of events from the beginning gives the reader a clear picture of a girl who was born in problems and in spite of her intelligence she always became a victim of circumstances.
• AIDS Discrimination in “Philadelphia” (1993) by Jonathan Demme “Philadelphia” is the film that appeared on the screens at the end of the 20th century. He is a lawyer, who copes with his duties easily and is known as one of the best professionals.
• Root Causes and Solutions to Racism Media is meant to eradicate racism and maintain unity among people but the case is different in some situations. Also, it is vital to make children understand nothing is amusing in the use of stereotypes […]
• The Discrimination Disparity Continuum. Bill Macumber Though these guidelines are available and are supposed to be the guide for the justice system, there have been cases when there have been a miscarriage of justice, which has led to the conviction of […]
• Prejudice and Discrimination What I can say about myself is that being in a group while studying the nature of bias and discrimination was a useful experience.
• Sarah Baartman: A Victim of Discrimination The life of Sara Baartman continues to attract the attention of people who are interested in the history of colonialism and slavery. This is one of the details that attract the attention of the viewer.
• “Sexism in English: Embodiment and Language” In this essay, as well as in all of her essays from the collection titled “Sexism and Language,” Alleen Pace Nilsen holds the view that the feminine eponyms identify a woman with her body, while […]
• Accent Discrimination and the Harmful Effects The learners of English as a second language have been greatly affected because of the discrimination faced from other individuals because of the difference in pronunciation.
• Discrimination at Publix Incorporation Despite the claim by the management of Publix Incorporation that the firm is committed to ensuring non-discrimination; the firm has not effectively implemented policies aimed at abating discrimination.
• Racism and Intolerance: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Crafting a Legacy by Messer elaborates on the legacy of the event and its repercussions and offers a profound analysis of the issue, which strengthened my focus of the research.
• The Life of Muslims in the USA and Discrimination The life of Muslims in the USA is a topic of numerous researches. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the group that should present Islamic perspective to the American audience, is believed to be radical and […]
• How Racism Makes Us Sick: Public Talk That Matters As a developing learner, I find this speech as a good example of how to raise such provocative themes as racism in the United States and not to be obsessed with prejudice.
• Does Racism and Discrimination Still Exist Today? This fact explains why racism and discrimination are inseparable in many parts of the globe. Sex discrimination continues to affect the goals and expectations of many women in our society.
• Why Is Discrimination a Barrier in the Working Environment? Moreover, discrimination in the workplace is a barrier because it has led to loss of focus in companies, thus lowering the production rate.
• The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement Miller is of the view that it is the white scholars that are responsible for impeding the success of black athletes and performers.
• Cause and Effect of Racial Discrimination Irrespective of massive efforts to emphasize the role of diversity and equality in society, it is still impossible to state that the United States is free from racial discrimination.
• Sexism in the English Language The significance of Piercey’s discussion is the attempts to prove the idea that the English language is sexist in the nature, thus, the topic of the gender inequality is discussed with references to the linguistic […]
• Discrimination as Part of Society Thus, the authors focus on the analytical analysis of any phenomenon of discrimination: the study of social, historical, political, and other aspects that have an impact on the growth of oppression of certain groups.
• Discussion of Language Discrimination Moreover, while Kina preferred to be silent in front of lawyers and solicitors, Daisy Li could speak up on the matter even with her “broken” English.
• Racism: US v. The Amistad and Dred Scott v. Sandford In legal terms, the key difference between the two was that the Africans from Amistad were freeborn and enslaved in violation of the international agreements, while Dred Scott, despite his sojourn in Illinois, was born […]
• Controversy of Gender and Race Discrimination Gender and race issues should be well tackled, for instance, in some of the societies men are believed to be superior to women and hold all the important positions in the society.
• Discrimination: Chalmers v. Tulon Company of Richmond Chalmers, a devoted Christian, saw it her duty to share her Lord’s gospel, and thought it her duty to inform her coworkers of their “improper conduct” in the face of God.
• The Roma Problems and the Causes of Racism 3 Is it any wonder that the insular, superstitious, monolithically Catholic or Orthodox communities of Europe and Eastern Europe, eager to recapture the civil order and peace of the golden age of the Roman Empire […]
• Discrimination at the Workplace: Legislations Regarding Discrimination In addition, the law was also instrumental in the establishment of the EEOC, a body charged with the responsibility of implementing this particular law, along with other laws that seeks to protect employees against discrimination […]
• Contrast Between Tituba and John Indian and Countering Racism The declaration suggests that Conde believed the story of Tituba’s maltreatment needed to be told to expose the truth she had been denied due to her skin color and gender.
• Racism Effects on the Premier League Players This work aims to provide a full picture of the real issue, and it is fundamental to understand the essence of the problem through the investigation of the players’ personal opinions and their experiences.
• Scientific Racism: the Eugenics of Social Darwinism I think that the development of Scientific Racism and further Eugenics became the result of people’s attempts to justify their unethical behavior toward other individuals and to support their material goals to develop slavery, and […]
• Islam and Racism: Malcolm X’s Letter From Mecca Malcolm’s experience of the pilgrimage has made him believe that real unity and understanding actually can exist between people regardless of their country of birth, the color of skin, or the language they speak.
• Bias and Discrimination in Early Childhood Care Centers One of the white children in John’s classroom asks one of the black children why his skin is so dirty for the whole class to hear.
• Gender-Based Discrimination in the Workplace In order to give a good account of the effects of gender-based discrimination against women, this paper examines the space of women in the automotive engineering industry.
• Discrimination against Immigrants Immigrants face different types of discrimination in the course of their stay in the U. The most common types of discrimination that the immigrants in the U.
• Discrimination Cases and Their Outcomes In the US, noticeable and influential cases tend to occur, and they remind the nation of the existing problem and reduce the effect of discrimination.
• English Literature Impact on Racism Among Africans Examining the topic of race and racism in language has not been a grave issue in the recent years, particularly because most of the discourse experts are whites.
• Racism: De Brahm’s Map and the Casta Paintings However, De Brahm’s map is one of the most striking pieces of evidence of the conquest of space and the entrenchment of the idea of land and people as titular property.
• Racism and Inequality in Society The idea of race as a social construct is examined in the first episode of the documentary series “The Power of an Illusion”.
• Anti-Racism: Marginalization and Exclusion in Healthcare This essay examines the course’s impact and the concepts of marginalization and exclusion in healthcare. Marginalization is a concept that has profoundly influenced the understanding of race and racism in healthcare.
• Workplace Discrimination: Types and Regulations In the 1970s and the 1990s, disability rights evolved with the introduction of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• The Issue of Racism in the United States The entire history of the United States is permeated with the evolution of the ideas of racism. Turning to history, we can see that the U.S.moved from slavery to using the Black population to solve […]
• History of Racial Discrimination in Haiti and America The choice of topic, racial discrimination in Haiti and America, was influenced by beliefs, values, and assumptions emphasizing the importance of equality and justice for all races.
• Racism and History of Discrimination As a result, advocacy should be aimed at creating new models in criminal justice that will ensure the protection of all minority groups and due process.
• Racial Discrimination and Color Blindness Of the three ideologies, racial harmony is considered the most appropriate for coping with problems of racism and racial injustice due to various reasons.
• Race, Racism, and Dangers of Race Thinking While it is true that some forms of race thinking can be used to justify and perpetuate racism, it is not necessarily the case that all forms of race thinking are inherently racist. Race thinking […]
• LGBTQ+ (Queer) Military Discrimination in Healthcare Furthermore, the subject is relevant to the field of psychology as the current phenomenon examines discrimination in healthcare both from the psychological outcomes experienced by veterans as well as the perception of LGBTQ+ patients through […]
• Racial Discrimination in American Literature In this way, the author denies the difference between people of color and whites and, therefore, the concept of racism in general.
• Discrimination at Work and Persistent Poverty While discrimination remains contributing to persistent poverty, organizations may benefit from blind hiring, an inclusive and accepting culture, and visible leadership to ensure efficient diversity management on a long-term basis. In conclusion, discrimination remains a […]
• Racism in the US: Settler Imperialism They prove that colonial imperialism is a structure, not a contextual phenomenon and that, as such, it propagates the marginalization of native people.
• Why Empathy in Racism Should Be Avoided Empathy is the capacity to comprehend and experience the emotions and ideas of others. Moreover, empathic emotions are essential to social and interpersonal life since they allow individuals to adapt their cognitive processes to their […]
• Discrimination Against African-American Patients The study results are inconsistent due to the selected approach and limited sample size. The study focused on the personal experiences of a small local group of African-American patients, primarily elderly females, not allowing for […]
• Racial Discrimination in High Education This peer-reviewed scholar article was found in the JSTOR database through entering key words “race affirmative action” and marking the publication period between 2017 and 2022.
• Discrimination Against Survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools According to Schwetizer, such institutions were characterized by poor conditions, heavy workloads, and the oppression of cultural attributes, through the use of which the government expected to adapt the aboriginal people to society’s standards.
• Social Sciences: Racism Through Different Lenses A thorough analysis of diversity adds value to social interactions by informing human behavior through a deeper understanding of racism and its impacts on society. Using the humanities lens leads to a better understanding of […]
• Successful Bias Lawsuits: Texas Company in Employment Discrimination Case The allegation was filed by the Department of Labor’s office in 2020, after the evidence indicated a shortfall of black and Asian employees at the company.
• Racial Discrimination in Dormitory Discrimination is considered to be behavior that restricts the rights and freedoms of the individual. Therefore, it is essential to investigate discrimination in dormitories and propose solutions to this problem, such as disseminating knowledge about […]
• Racism and Its Impact on Populations and Society The ignorance of many individuals about other people’s cultures and ethnicities is one of the causes of racism. One can examine the various components of society and how they relate to the issue of racism […]
• Eliminating Discrimination: Poems From “Counting Descent” by Clint Smith The poems illustrated how the world is passed, what the ocean said to the black boy, and what the cicada said to the black boy.
• Institutionalized Racism and Individualistic Racism Excellent examples of individualistic racism include the belief in white supremacy, racial jokes, employment discrimination, and personal prejudices against black people. Overall, institutionalized and individualistic racism is a perversive issue that affects racial relations in […]
• Community Engagement with Racism To enhance the population’s degree of involvement in racism, the study calls for collaboration; this can be seen as a community effort to foster a sense of teamwork.
• LGBT Discrimination Research Prospects: An Analysis The aim of this assignment is to summarize the research that has been done on LGBT discrimination, particularly in the workplace and during the recruiting process.
• Discrimination Against the Elderly Population in the Medical Field The first week I was preoccupied, being my first time interacting with the older patients and also the fact that it was my first week and I was just getting used to the environment.
• The Pricing Policy of Price Discrimination The equilibrium price of a commodity from the point of view of a free market is formed at the intersection of supply and demand, which fluctuates depending on many factors.
• Racism Detection with Implicit Association Test Racial bias is deeply rooted in human society and propelled by norms and stereotypic ideologies that lead to implicit bias and the unfair treatment of minority groups.
• The Age Discrimination in Employment Act The law ADEA, which stands for The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, exhausts assumptions or beliefs that age affects a person’s ability to work.
• Identity and Belonging: Racism and Ethnicity In the documentary Afro Germany – Being Black and German, several individuals share their stories of feeling mistreated and excluded because of their skin color.
• Policies to Eliminate Racial Disparities and Discrimination The solution to exclusion is to build social inclusion in the classroom and within the school by encouraging peer acceptance, cross-group friendships, and built-in prevention.
• Living With HIV: Stigma and Discrimination The mental health and emotional well-being of the population living with this virus are affected due to the humiliation and judgment they face from their fellows around them.
• Causes, Facilitators, and Solutions to Racism These theories suggest that racism serves a particular function in society, occurs due to the interactions of individuals from dominant groups, and results from a human culture of prejudice and discrimination.
• Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about […]
• Empathy and Racism in Stockett’s The Help and Li’s To Kill a Mockingbird To start with, the first approach to racism and promoting empathy is to confront prevalent discrimination and racism, which was often shown in The Help. Another solution to racism and the possibility of promoting empathy […]
• Education in Canada and Discrimination In general, the immersion in the history of the residential school system on the basis of related articles, videos, and music has left a highly oppressive feeling.
• Is Troy Maxson (Wilson’s Fences) a Victim of Racism? As a black American, Troy’s childhood experiences have been passed on to his children, making him a victim of an oppressive culture. Therefore, this makes Troy a victim of racism and culture, contributing to his […]
• Discrimination in the US Healthcare Sector More than 70% of those who buy insurance plans via the exchanges are also estimated to be entitled to tax credits, which will further lower their rates in addition to the lower premiums.
• Racism in the Healthcare Sector In 2020, the cases and instances of racism in healthcare rose by 16% from 2018; there were notable instances of racism in various spheres of health. 9% of blacks have been protected from discrimination and […]
• The Airline Industry: Sex Discrimination Although some females and males are fighting these stereotypes, there has been a culture in the airline industry to give females the flight attendant jobs and males the piloting jobs. Similarly, the roles of male […]
• Individual and Structural Discrimination Toward LGBT (Queer) Military Personnel Consequently, LGBT military personnel are potentially even more vulnerable to mental health issues due to the combined stress of being LGBT and being in the military.
• Racism in Healthcare and Education The mission should emphasize that it promotes diversity and equality of all students and seeks to eliminate racial bias. It is necessary to modify the mission to include the concept of inclusiveness and equality.
• Equal Opportunity and Discrimination Thus, if a female individual feels denied a job opportunity due to the employer’s attitude to her possible pregnancy, she can apply to the Equal employment opportunity commission and ask for an investigation. EO serves […]
• Institutional Racism in the Workplace Despite countless efforts to offer African-Americans the same rights and opportunities as Whites, the situation cannot be resolved due to the emergence of new factors and challenges.
• Racism in Education in the United States Such racial disparities in the educational workforce confirm the problem of structural racism and barrier to implementing diversity in higher medical education. Structural racism has a long history and continues to affect the growth of […]
• Individuals With Disabilities: Prejudice and Discrimination I researched that people with persistent medical or physical disorders, such as cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, who have speech, articulation, or communication impairments, for example, are sometimes seen as having an intellectual deficiency. Corey […]
• Rhetoric in Obama’s 2008 Speech on Racism When the audience became excited, it was Obama’s responsibility to convey his message in a more accessible form. To conclude, Obama’s speech in 2008 facilitated his election as the first African American President in history.
• How to Talk to Children About Racism The text begins by referring to recent events that were related to race-based discrimination and hatred, such as the murder of George Floyd and the protests dedicated to the matter.
• Care for Real: Racism and Food Insecurity Care for Real relies on the generosity of residents, donation campaigns, and business owners to collect and deliver these supplies. The research article discusses some of the factors that contribute to the creation of racism […]
• Racism Towards Just and Holistic Health Therefore, the critical content of the event was to determine the steps covered so far in the fight for racial equality in the provision of care and what can be done to improve the status […]
• People With Mental Illnesses: Stigma, Prejudice, and Discrimination The post raises awareness of the highly important and rarely discussed topic of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination against people with mental illnesses, which are not only harmful on their own but also make such individuals […]
• Workplace Discrimination: Impact of Family-Friendly Policies There is a reduction in the number of compulsory working hours, allowing employees more time to spend with their families and children.
• Discrimination Culture in Saudi Oil and Gas Sector The purpose of this paper is to inspect the interrelationship between the organizational culture and discrimination in the O&G sector in Saudi Arabia.
• Racism and Related Issues in Canadian Society The first issue is that it does not review the systemic and structural aspects of racism and how it affects various institutions and society as a whole.
• LGBTQ+ Families: Discrimination and Challenges The family model directly affects the social status of family members and the well-being of children. LGBTQ+ families’ wealth level is lower than that of families in the neighborhood due to labor discrimination.
• Public Discrimination Based on the Status of Vaccination from COVID-19 It should be noted that COVID-19 is not a rare or exotic disease, but the rapid spread of this infection from the Chinese city of Wuhan led to the dramatic assignment of pandemic status to […]
• LGBTQ Members: Discrimination and Stigmatization What remains unclear from the reading is the notion that before the 1990s, people from the middle class expressed abiding and strong desires to be acknowledged as “the other sex”.
• Systemic Racism and Discrimination Thus, exploring the concept of race from a sociological perspective emphasizes the initial aspect of inequality in the foundation of the concept and provides valuable insight into the reasons of racial discrimination in modern society.
• The Racism Problem and Its Relevance The images demonstrate how deeply racism is rooted in our society and the role the media plays in spreading and combating racism.
• Gender Discrimination in Public Administration The subject of the dispute and the statement of claim was the vacancy of a traffic controller, which was initially offered to Johnson, but then, as part of the program, the place was given to […]
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Aspects of Socio-Economic Sides of Racism And the answer is given in Dorothy Brown’s article for CNN “Whites who escape the attention of the police benefit because of slavery’s long reach”.. This shows that the problem of racism is actual in […]
• Misogyny and Sexism in Policing A solution to solving sexism and misogyny in policing is increasing the number of female police officers and educating on gender bias.
• Sexism and Internal Discrimination at Google The recommendation in the case is that the organization should provide justice to all the employees who are victims of discrimination and sexual harassment, irrespective of the perpetrator.
• Tackling Racism in the Workplace It means that reporting racism to HR does not have the expected positive effect on workplace relations, and employees may not feel secure to notify HR about the incidences of racism.
• Issue of Racism Around the World One of the instances of racism around the world is the manifestations of violence against indigenous women, which threatens the safety of this vulnerable group and should be mitigated.
• Discrimination in the United States The paper’s authors see systemic racism as a consequence of segregation in World War I migration, which resulted in distinct communities that were not understandable to white Americans.
• Causes of Discrimination Towards Immigrants Discrimination and intolerance against immigrants, and the implications of these inflammatory convictions and conduct, determine the sociocultural and economic destiny of welcoming nations and those who aspire to make these communities their new residence.
• The Racism Problem and How to Fight It Racism is one of the common problems of the modern world which might not allow several individuals to feel a valuable part of society due to their skin color, gender, or social status.
• Environmental Racism: The Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan The situation is a manifestation of environmental racism and classism since most of the city’s population is people of color and poor. Thus, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a manifestation of environmental racism […]
• The “Racism and Discrimination” Documentary The documentary “Racism and Discrimination” is about an anti-racist teacher Jane Elliot who attempts to show the white people the feeling of discrimination. The central argument of the documentary is diversity training to seize the […]
• Abortion-Related Racial Discrimination in the US In spite of being a numerical minority, Black women in the U.S.resort to abortion services rather often compared to the White population.
• Canadian Society: Sexism and the Persistent Woman Question Equality of work, payments, and respect for women is on the agenda of this party, but they lack a modern look that refers to the problems of harassment and bullying in social networks.
• Social Problems Surrounding Racism, Prejudice and Discrimination This kind of discrimination makes the students lose their self-esteem and the traumas experienced affects the mental health of these students in the long term.
• Discussion of Gender Discrimination in Modern Society In the professional field, women are constantly in discriminatory positions of jeopardy due to their gender. However, women still need to compete in the work environment.
• Gender Roles, Expectations, and Discrimination Despite Isaac being the calmest boy in the school, he had a crush on Grace, a beautiful girl in the school who was from a wealthy family.
• The Unethical Practice of Racism in a Doctor’s Case The involvement of Barrett in the protest is both unethical for the university’s image and immoral for the community. However, the school would likely face tougher court fines and a direct order to reinstate Barrett’s […]
• The Problem of Racism in America One explanation of racism by feminist thinkers is that racism is a manifestation of the agency and power of people of a particular racial identity over others.
• Racism: “The Sum of Us” Article by McGhee The economic analysis and sociological findings in America have drawn a detailed picture of the cost of racism in America and how to overcome it together.
• Contemporary Sociological Theories and American Racism The central intention of this theory paper is to apply modern theoretical concepts from the humanities discipline of sociology to the topic of racism in the United States.
• Sex Workers: Discrimination and Criminalization The essay looks at the problem of discrimination against sex workers and the criminalization of sex work and highlights efforts that have been made towards decriminalization of the activity.
• A Cause-and-Effect Analysis of Racism and Discrimination As a result, it is vital to conduct a cause-and-effect analysis to determine the key immediate and hidden causes of racism to be able to address them in a proper manner.
• The Issue of Obesity in the Workplace: Discrimination and Its Prevention The critical detail is that the spread of the negative attitude to obesity in the workplace leads to the segregation of overweight people, stereotypical perceptions of their abilities, and prejudged attitudes toward them.
• Employment Discrimination Based on Religion In other words, although both elementary teachers had no formal title of a minister and limited religious training, the religious education and formation of students were the basic reason for the existence of the majority […]
• Institutional Racism Through the Lenses of Housing Policy While not being allowed to buy property because of the racial covenants, the discriminated people had to house in other areas.
• The Problem of Age Discrimination Ageism includes many tendencies that change people; thus, ageism entails factors that influence people’s perception of each other, for example, in the work environment.
• Social Inequality and Discrimination Gender discrimination is when a person or a group of people is treated unfairly or unfairly because of their gender. Moreover, there is a classification of the thinking model in which a person exalts his […]
• Job Discrimination and Harassment Secondly, the strengths of the discrimination suit include the fact that he is the only white employee in his unit and one of the few men, suggesting a certain bias within the hiring department.
• Dealing With Race Discrimination: Impact of Color Blindness However, psychologists have been trying to employ racial color blindness as a strategy to manage diversity and intergroup affairs. However, in other places, such as in enduring structural racism, it serves as a device to […]
• Role of Racism in Contemporary US Public Opinion This source is useful because it defines racism, describes its forms, and presents the survey results about the prevalence of five types of racial bias.
• The Amazon Warehouse Employee Sexual Orientation Discrimination With the mismatch between the aspects of the work at the Amazon warehouse, the demand for the job, the ability to work successfully, and the wants and desires of the employees, it is worth noting […]
• The Mutation of Racism into New Subtle Forms The trend reflects the ability of racism to respond to the rising sensitivity of the people and the widespread rejection of prejudice.
• Racism: Healthcare Crisis and the Nurses Role The diminished admittance to mind is because of the impacts of fundamental bigotry, going from doubt of the medical care framework to coordinate racial segregation by medical care suppliers.
• Origins of Racial Discrimination Despite such limitations as statistical data being left out, I will use this article to support the historical evaluation of racism in the United States and add ineffective policing to the origins of racism.
• Language Discrimination in Modern Society It is necessary to let go of the fear of talking and writing on social networks in a language that is not native to you.
• Anti-discrimination Legislation and Supporting Case Law The response to this was the abolition of the quota system and the adoption in 1995 of the Act on Non-Discrimination of the Disabled and a package of additional regulations, in particular, on the education […]
• Beverly Greene Life and View of Racism The plot of the biography, identified and formed by the Ackerman Institute for the Family in the life of the heroine, consists of dynamics, personality development and its patterns.
• Historical Racism in South Africa and the US One of the major differences between the US and South Africa is the fact that in the case of the former, an African American minority was brought to the continent to serve the White majority.
• Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Discrimination In this Ted Talk, Sandberg also raises a question regarding the changes that are needed to alter the current disbalance in the number of men and women that achieve professional excellence.
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present Racism includes social and economic inequalities due to racial identity and is represented through dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in the past and lynching, criminalization, and incarceration in the present.
• Minstrels’ Influence on the Spread of Racism The negative caricatures and disturbing artifacts developed to portray Black people within the museum were crucial in raising awareness on the existence of racism.
• How Parents of Color Transcend Nightmare of Racism Even after President Abraham Lincoln outlawed enslavement and won the American Civil War in 1965, prejudice toward black people remained engrained in both the northern and southern cultural structures of the United States.
• Bias and Discrimination: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotyping The bias may be automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent depending on its characteristics and how it manifests in terms of people’s opinions on certain groups of individuals.
• A Problem of Racial Discrimination in the Modern World This minor case suggests the greater problem that is unjustly treating people in the context of the criminal justice system. In the book, Stevenson writes about groups of people who are vulnerable to being victimized […]
• Beverly Tatum’s Monolog About Injustice of Racism Furthermore, the author’s point is to define the state of discrimination in the country and the world nowadays and explore what steps need to be taken to develop identity.
• Discrimination: Trans World Airlines, Inc. vs. Hardison However, the court concluded that TWA made a reasonable effort at accommodating Hardison and granting him the request to work four days a week would detriment the function of his department due to them being […]
• Discrimination in the Bostock v. Clayton County Case
• Issue of Institutional Racism
• Discrimination: Peterson v. Wilmur Communications
• Racism in America Today: Problems of Today
• Evidence of Existence of Modern Racism
• Culture Play in Prejudices, Stereotyping, and Racism
• Latin-African Philosophical Wars on Racism in US
• Confronting Stereotypes, Racism and Microaggression
• Racial Discrimination in Dallas-Fort Worth Region
• Healthcare Call to Action: Racism in Medicine
• White Counselors Broaching Race and Racism Study
• US Federal Anti-Discrimination Laws Response
• British Colonial Racism for Aboriginal Australians
• Discrimination Against African American Nurses
• “Ocean Acidification Impairs Olfactory Discrimination…” by Munday
• American Culture and Its Racism Roots
• The Black People: Sexuality and Racial Discrimination
• Racial Discrimination Through the Cosmetics Industry
• Racism Evolution: Experience of African Diaspora
• The Problem of Explicit Racism
• Discrimination Against Hispanics in America
• Discrimination and Prejudice Comparison
• Racial Discrimination and Residential Segregation
• Significance of Perceived Racism:Ethnic Group Disparities in Health
• Religious Practices and Business Discrimination
• Discrimination in Canadian Society
• The Sexism Behind HB16 Bill
• Social Justice, Diversity and Workplace Discrimination
• Racism as Origin of Enslavement
• Colorblind Racism and Its Minimization
• Legacy of Racism Against African American Women and Men
• The Bill H.R.666 Anti-Racism in Public Health Act of 2021
• When Men Experience Sexism Article by Berlatsky
• Summary of the Issue About Racism
• Non-White Experience: Stereotyping and Discrimination
• How the Prison Industrial Complex Perpetuate Racism
• Social Change Project: Religious Discrimination in the Workplace
• Disability Discrimination and How to Deal With It
• Battling Racism in the Modern World
• Indian Youth Against Racism: Photo Analysis
• Racism: Do We Need More Stringent Laws?
• Free Speech vs. Anti-Discrimination Practices Conflict
• Problem of Racism in Schools Overview
• US Immigration Policy and Its Correlation to Structural Racism
• The Fashion Industry: Discrimination Case
• America: Racism, Terrorism, and Ethno-Culturalism
• The Pink Tax Issue: Economic Discrimination Against Women
• Discrimination and Substance Use Disorders among Latinos’ Article Review
• Racism in Healthcare and Its Implications
• Issue of Racism in Healthcare
• Workplace Discrimination Based on Attractiveness
• Racism and Statistical & Pure Discrimination
• Solving Racial Discrimination in the US: The Best Strategies
• Popular Music at the Times of Racism and Segregation
• Religious Discrimination Against a Muslim Employee
• Temporary Aid Program: Racism in Child Welfare
• Wearing Headscarves and Workplace Discrimination
• The Problem of Racism in the Police Force
• Discussion Board Post: Discrimination and Harassment
• The Discrimination of African Americans
• The Issue of Discrimination Within American Ethnicity by Aguirre and Turner
• Western Scientific Approach as a Cause of Racism
• How Does Racism Affect Health?
• Investigating the Discrimination in the Workplace
• Citizen: An American Lyric and Systemic Racism
• The Reflection of Twain’s Views on Racism in Huck Finn
• Black as a Label: Racial Discrimination
• Urban Regime Theory in Anti-Black Discrimination
• Nike: Workplace Writing and Discrimination
• Environmental Discrimination in Canada
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Racial Discrimination
• Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism
• Housing Discrimination and Federal Laws Analysis
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism in the US
• American Healthcare in the Context of Racism
• Discrimination and Politics of Gender and Sexuality
• Discussion of COVID-19 and Discrimination
• Origins of Modern Racism and Ancient Slavery
• Discrimination of Employees With Physical and Cognitive Impairments in the Workplace
• Contribution of Racism to Economic Recession Due to COVID-19
• What Stories Can Teach Us About Racism
• Racism in Canadian Medical System
• Profit and Racism in the Prisons of the United States
• Everyday Sexism in Relation to Everyday Disablism
• Discrimination and Health of Immigrants in Canada
• Life History Interview: Discrimination as an African American
• Discrimination. Unequal or Unfair Treatment of Individuals
• Rio Tinto: Case Study About Racism and Discrimination
• Discrimination in the Workplace: How to Solve It
• Race and Color Discrimination Against US Employees
• Discrimination Against People of Color and Queer Community
• Critical Social Problems Research: Racism and Racial Domination
• Discrimination as an External Manifestation of Societal Ills
• Business and Corporate Law: Discrimination Case Analysis
• Harassment Law – Tennie Pierce Discrimination
• Discrimination Against Women and Protecting Laws
• Criminal Justice: Racial Prejudice and Racial Discrimination
• The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)
• Manifestations of Gender Discrimination in Insurance
• Discrimination Against Customers With Disabilities
• Work Place Discrimination
• The History of Racial Discrimination and Its Effects on the American Races
• Protections Against Employment Discrimination
• Discrimination Complaint on a Civil Litigation Processes
• Racial Discrimination in the US Criminal Justice System
• Policing in America: The Issue of Violence and Racism
• LGBTQ Rights: Sexual Minority Members Discrimination
• Institutional and Interpersonal Racism, White Privilege
• Racism and Sexism as a Threat
• The Aspects of Discrimination
• The Development of a Measure to Assess Symbolic Racism
• Syrian Conflict and Women Rights: Way to Equality or Another Discrimination
• Racism and Tokenism in Bon Appetit: Leadership and Ethical Perspective
• Ethnic Stratification, Prejudice & Discrimination
• From “Scientific” Racism to Local Histories of Lynching
• Equal Pay Act: Pay Discrimination
• Sexism Against Women in the Military
• Subjective Assumptions and Medicine: Racism
• Racism and Gender in Beyoncé’s Lemonade
• Anti-Discrimination Laws in the U.S.
• Discrimination Against Muslim in the USA
• Racism Experiences in the Workplace in the UK
• Race and Ethnicity, Other Minorities and Discrimination
• The History of Immigration to the United States and the Nature of Racism
• Gender and the Problem of Discrimination
• Discrimination and the Hiring Process
• Legal Process About Discrimination
• Race and Racism in the USA: The Origins and the Future
• Genetics of Sexual Orientation: Privacy, Discrimination, and Social Engineering
• Environmental Racism in the United States: Concept, Solution to the Problem
• Discrimination in Puerto Rico
• Protecting George Wallace’s Organized Racism
• How Can the World Unite to Fight Racism?
• Fighting Anti-Muslim Sentiments
• Female Workers Discrimination and Affirmative Action
• Ideological Support Arab Muslim Discrimination
• The Most Prominent Forms of Discrimination
• Discrimination of Women in IT Sphere
• Gender Discrimination in the Workplace and Better Management Skills
• Racism in America and Its Literature
• Race, Class and Gender. Racism on Practice
• Racism: Term Definition and History of Display of Racism Remarks
• Institutional Discrimination, Prejudice and Racism
• The Glass Ceiling Term: Discrimination in the Healthcare Sector
• Racism in Contemporary North America
• Racial Discrimination of Women in Modern Community
• Racial and Gender Discrimination in the Workplace and Housing
• History of Sexism: Features in the Legal System
• Racism Without Racists in Patriarchal Society
• Racism in Employment Practices
• Asians Discrimination in USA
• Discrimination in the United States of America
• Racism: Definition and Consequences
• The Problem of Racism in Canada
• The Discrimination Against Women in United Kingdom
• Exploring and Comparing Racism and Ethnocentrism
• Discrimination Against Black People
• Intraracial Discrimination: Grace Hsiang’s Article’s Analysis
• Ethics of Gender Identity Discrimination at Work
• Racism Cannot Be Unlearned Through Education
• Racism Among Students of Swinburne University
• Racism in Movies: Stereotypes and Prejudices
• Racism Concepts: Influence of Politics
• Racism: Resolving by Means of Education
• Sexual Discrimination in Astra Company
• Intersectionality Oppression and Discrimination in Latin America
• Sexism in Media: The Effect of Media on Adolescent Females
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Canada
• The Issues of Racial Discrimination in US
• Price Discrimination in Healthcare and Family Health Care Insurance
• Facing Racism: A Short Story
• Prejudice as the Root Cause of the Discrimination
• Sexual Discrimination Scandal: Astra-USA
• Astra Way: Sexual Discrimination Scandal
• Business Ethics: Discrimination Against Employees
• White Supremacy as an Extreme Racism Group
• The Impact of Catholic Views on Discrimination Against Women and Minorities in the Workplace
• Gender and Cultural Discrimination in Modern Society
• Holocaust: From Discrimination to Concentration Camps
• Muslim Discrimination in the UK After the July 7 Attacks
• American Racism: So Why Isn’t Obama White?
• Modern Racism in American Society
• Obama, the First US Black President: Is Racism Over?
• Analyzing Discrimination Against Jews
• Philosophy of Human Conduct: Institutional Racism
• Explaining Persistence of Discrimination and Privilege
• Literature on Latina Women and Sexism
• Racism and Civil Rights: Then and Now
• Employee Issues: Gender Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, Discrimination
• Primary School Teaching: Challenging Racism
• Racism and White Supremacism in the American Government
• Discrimination in Recruiting & Promotional Aspects: Tanglewood Company
• Disability Discrimination Laws: Workers’ Compensation
• Human Resource Management: US Age Discrimination Act
• “Red Lining” – A Type of Discrimination
• Social Construction of Race and Racism
• The Problem of Gender-Based Employment Discrimination
• Discrimination Against Gays in the Military
• Canada: Discrimination in British North America
• Racism Issues: Looking and Stereotype
• The Problem of Gender Discrimination
• Hurricane Katrine Exposed Racism in New Orleans
• Muslim Society, Life Meaning, and Discrimination
• Affirmative Action and Reverse Discrimination
• AIDS in a Different Culture Review: Cultural Differences, Prejudice, and Racism
• Anti-Racism Policy Statement in Australian Schools
• Racism, Minorities and Majorities Analysis
• Chicano Discrimination in Higher Education
• Racism and Ethnicity in Latin America
• Problem of Racism to Native Americans in Sport
• Veiled Sexism in the United Arab Emirates
• Racial Discrimination in Song ‘Strange Fruit’
• Discrimination in Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office
• Social Psychology: Racism in Jury Behaviour
• Sexism in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Works
• Racism in the United States of the 21st Century
• Michael Blechman: ‘Diversity’ Looks a Lot Like Old-Fashioned Discrimination
• The Limits of Price Discrimination
• A Conduct Parameter Model of Price Discrimination
• Appiah’s Ideas of Racism, Equality, and Justice
• Discrimination Against Women and Immigrants at Work
• Consumer Welfare and Price Discrimination
• Racism in Media: Positive and Negative Impact
• Poverty, Stratification and Gender Discrimination
• Racism: World Politicians Discussion
• Racism: Once Overt, but Now Covert
• Lawsuits on Religious Discrimination
• Institutions and Gender Discrimination Issues
• Environmental Racism and Indigenous Knowledge
• Racism Effects on Criminal Justice System
• Ableism: Bias Against People With Disabilities
• Sexism: Gender, Class and Power
• Organizational Behavior: Group Size and Discrimination
• Stereotyping, Prejudice and Discrimination: Social Influence
• Rights, Equity and the State: Sexual Orientation and Discrimination
• Gender Discrimination on Birth Stage
• Racism in African American Studies and History
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Policing
• Racism vs. “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself”
• Racism in Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders
• Immigrant Employment Issues and Discrimination
• Gender Discrimination in the United States
• Price Discrimination and Psychological Techniques
• Robert Senske vs Sybase Inc: Labor Discrimination Case
• Evian and Aquafina Waters: Stimulus Discrimination Concept
• Employment Discrimination and Law Amendment
• Sexism and Presidential Elections in the USA
• Legal and Ethical Issues: Discrimination Remedy
• The Effects of Labor Market Discrimination
• Religious Discrimination in the Workplace
• Racism in Australian Football League Sporting Clubs
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Diverse Organizations
• Thomas Jefferson on Civil Rights, Slavery, Racism
• Discrimination in Admission Policies Criteria
• Racial Discrimination in Australian Society
• Heterosexism and Its Explanation
• Discrimination and Employee Performance Studies
• Workplace Gender Equality and Discrimination Laws
• Racial Discrimination Forms Against Afro-Americas
• The Equal Opportunities Approach and Discrimination
• Pressing Issues in Femininity: Gender and Racism
• Positive Discrimination of Women in Hiring and Promotion
• Racial Discrimination in Employment
• The Problem of Discrimination Against the LGBT Community
• Fair Treatment and Discrimination in the Workplace
• Racial Bias and Discrimination in Law Enforcement
• White Privilege and Racism in American Society
• Racism, Privilege and Stereotyping Concepts
• Gender Discrimination and Shared Responsibility
• Kansas State University Community’s Racism Issues
• Australian Anti-Discrimination Acts and Their Provision
• Racism Against Roma and Afro-American People
• Classism as a Complex Issue of Discrimination
• Sexism and Male Nurses
• Gender, Size Discrimination and Fatphobia
• Impact of Racism as a Social Determinant of Health
• The Problem of Racism in Brazilian Football
• Racism in the United States: Before and After World War II
• Race-Norming and Discrimination Issues
• Baldwin’s and Coates’ Anti-Racism Communication
• The Problem of Racism and Injustice
• Racism as the Epitome of Moral Bankruptcy
• Sports: Discrimination, Match-Fixing and Doping
• Discrimination Against Women and Men of Different Races
• Employee Discrimination and Legal Protection
• Discrimination Against Refugees in a New Country
• Weight Discrimination and Beauty Prejudice in the HRM
• Hate Groups as Drivers of Discrimination
• Racism and Society: Different Perspectives
• Racism in Trump’s and Clinton’s Campaigns
• Obama’s Presidency and Racism in the USA
• Colin Powell and the Fight Against Structural Racism
• Workplace Discrimination and Legislation in the US
• Discrimination During the Recruitment Process
• Direct, Intentional, Institutional Discrimination
• Age Discrimination and Workplace Segregation
• Hate Crimes and Anti-Discrimination Laws
• Sexism and the Founding Fathers
• White Police’s Discrimination Against Black People
• Discrimination in Lending Practices
• Racial Discrimination in Employment in the US
• Racism in Media and Objective Coverage
• California Real Estate Discrimination
• Diversity and Discrimination in Hiring Process
• Workplace Discrimination Complaints
• Racism Elimination and Sociological Strategies
• Discrimination and Profiling in “Crash” Movie
• Employment Discrimination and Equal Opportunities
• Ableism in Education, Workplace and Community
• Gender Discrimination in History and Nowadays
• Social and Cultural Diversity and Racism
• Stereotyping and Discrimination in Advertising
• Does Unconscious Racism Exist by Lincoln Quillian
• Muslims in the US: Prejudice and Discrimination
• Sexual Orientation Discrimination Issue at the Workplace
• Racism and Discrimination in Religion Context
• Women’s Difference: Sex Discrimination
• Workplace Discrimination: Data Collection Methods
• US Teachers’ Rights, Dismissal, and Discrimination
• Sexual Orientation Discrimination at the Workplace
• Colorblindness as a Reason for Workplace Discrimination
• Discrimination in the USA: Cases and Policies
• Racism: Theoretical Perspectives and Research Methods
• Racism in the Setting the Rising Sun Postcard
• Car Pricing and Discrimination in Chicago
• The Effects of Racism on Learners Academic Outcomes
• Darwin’s and Galton’s Scientific Racism
• Eli Lilly & Company’s Discrimination Class Action
• The Voting Rights Act and Racial Discrimination
• Anthem by Ayn Rand: Discrimination Theme
• Discrimination Complaint and the Litigation Process
• Price Discrimination Concept in Economics
• Jerrell Shofner’s Views on the Racial Discrimination
• Prejudice and Discrimination Reduction Prospects
• People with Disabilities: The Systemic Ableism
• The US Government and Discrimination With Muslims
• Asian American Communities and Racism in the USA
• Racial Discrimination and Its Effects on Employees
• Racism in the USA: Causes, Consequences and Solutions
• Discrimination of Women and Minorities in Firms
• Negative Aspects of Discrimination at the Workplace
• Sexism as Perceived by the Young Men
• Racial Discrimination in Social Institutions
• Effects of Discrimination in the Workplace
• King’s and Obama’s Views on Racism in America
• Lanning v. SEPTA: Employment Discrimination and Testing Practices
• Girls Discrimination in the Modern Educational System
• Racism Manifests in the Contemporary Society
• Racism in USA: Virginia Laws on Slavery
• Racism as a Reality of Modern American Society
• Homosexual Discrimination in Our Society: Causes and Effects
• Ethnicity and Issues of Racism in the United States
• Rodney King’s Case of Racial Discrimination
• Discrimination by Appearance in the USA
• Educational Attainment and Racial Discrimination
• Racial Discrimination Against Asian American Students
• Racism Issue and Solutions
• Addressing Discrimination at Workplace
• On Language Grounds: Discrimination of International Students
• Sexism in the English Language Issue
• Intersectionality and Gendered Racism
• International Students Discrimination in the USA
• Racism and Education in the United States
• Discrimination Due to Language Differences
• Racism in Michigan University
• Gender Discrimination in Russian Workplaces
• Racial Discrimination at the Workplace
• Racism and Sexism Ethical Problem
• Conflict and Racial Hostility
• “Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination” by Steven Greenhouse
• Racism as a Case of Ignorance and Prejudice
• Racism and Segregation in American History
• Discrimination Definition and Characteristics
• Humanism, Racism, and Speciesism
• Discrimination Definition, Its Causes and Effects
• Racism in American Schools
• Racist America: Current Realities and Future Prospects
• Racism: Impact on Minorities in American Society
• Discrimination in the Workplace: Denial of Promotion
• Asian-Americans Workplace Discrimination
• Self-Interest and Discrimination in Sociology
• Civil Movements: Discrimination and Its Consequences
• Racism Against Native Americans
• The Recruitment of Employees and Discrimination
• Gender Discrimination in the Workplace: Resolving Glass Ceiling Issue
• Obama’s First Election and Racism
• Adolf Hitler: From Patriotism to Racism
• Discrimination and Affirmative Action
• Problems of Environmental Racism
• How Obama’s First Election Has Been Affected by Racism?
• Race Discrimination in the USA
• How Different Young Australians Experience Racism?
• Racial Discrimination in Organizations
• Understanding Race and Racism
• In Australia, Are Cultural Rights a Form of Racism?
• Racism, Stigma, and Eexism – Sociology
• African Americans: Race and Ethnic Discrimination
• Racism and Ethnicity in United States
• Ethnic Stratification, Prejudice, Discrimination: Hispanics
• Problems of Ethnic Discrimination in US
• ‘Animal Rights’ Activists and Racism
• Diversity and Discrimination in the Workplace: The Role in Activities of an Organization
• Price Discrimination Economics
• Sex Discrimination at Wal-Mart
• Religious and Racal Discrimination in Eboo Patel’s “Acts of Faith”
• The Racial Discrimination Among Employers
• The Discrimination Against Women Employees in the Telecommunication Industry
• Theories of Cultural Diversity: Anthropological Theory and Discrimination
• Psychological Impact: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Racism
• Discrimination and Affirmative Action: New Haven Firefighter’s Case
• Multicultural Psychology: Cultural Identity and Racism
• Employing Individuals to Fill in Vacancies in the Company
• How Fake News Use Satire as a Medium to Address Issues on Racism?
• Young Australians and Racism
• Price Discrimination and Monopolistic Competition
• Relationship Between Institutionalized Racism and Marxism
• Statelessness and Discrimination
• Discrimination Against Black Women
• Democratic Racism in Canada
• Social Construction of “Race” and “Racism” and Its Relationship to Democratic Racism in Canada
• Ethnicity: Oppression and Racism
• The Impact of Prejudice and Discrimination
• Black or White Racism
• Age discrimination in Employment
• Discrimination in the Labor Market
• Racism in Family Therapy by Laszloffy and Hardy
• Racial Discrimination in the US
• The ‘Peopling’ Process of Australia Since 1788 With Influence of Racism
• Is Racism and Anti-Semitism Still a Problem in the United States?
• Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination?
• Are HIV/AIDS Carriers Suffering From Discrimination?
• Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups?
• Can Competition Among Employers Reduce Governmental Discrimination?
• Does Gender Discrimination Contribute to India’s Population Imbalance?
• Are Racial Profiling and Police Discrimination an Issue?
• Does Health Predict the Reporting of Racial Discrimination or Do Reports of Discrimination Predict Health?
• Can Gender-Fair Language Reduce Gender Stereotyping and Discrimination?
• Does Market Liberalisation Reduce Gender Discrimination?
• Are Spatial Frequency Cues Used for Whisker-Based Active Discrimination?
• Does Political Competition Lessen Ethnic Discrimination?
• Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination?
• Does Protecting Older Workers From Discrimination Make It Harder to Get Hired?
• Are the Processes Underlying Discrimination the Same for Women and Men?
• Does Racial Discrimination Exist Within the NBA?
• Can Social Media Lead to Labor Market Discrimination?
• Does Religious Discrimination Really Exist in Todays America?
• Did Fredy Villanueva Face Racial Discrimination?
• Does the Stimulus Type Influence Horses Performance in a Quantity Discrimination Task?
• Can the Government Deter Discrimination?
• Do Anti-discrimination Laws Alleviate Labor Market Duality?
• Can the One-Drop Rule Tell Us Anything About Racial Discrimination?
• Does Banning Price Discrimination Promote Entry and Increase Welfare?
• Have Anti-discrimination Housing Laws Worked?
• How Does Discrimination Affect People With Mental Illness?
• What Exactly Does Racial Discrimination Mean?
• Should the Racial Discrimination Act Be Reformed?
• What Are the Causes of Discrimination?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Essays and Commentary

Reflections and analysis inspired by the killing of George Floyd and the nationwide wave of protests that followed.

My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children

She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.

By Hilton Als

June 21, 2020

How do we change america.

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone.

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

June 8, 2020

The purpose of a house.

For my daughters, the pandemic was a relief from race-related stress at school. Then George Floyd was killed.

By Emily Bernard

June 25, 2020

The players’ revolt against racism, inequality, and police terror.

A group of athletes across various American professional sports have communicated the fear, frustration, and anger of most of Black America.

September 9, 2020, until black women are free, none of us will be free.

Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective.

July 20, 2020, john lewis’s legacy and america’s redemption.

The civil-rights leader, who died Friday, acknowledged the darkest chapters of the country’s history, yet insisted that change was always possible.

By David Remnick

July 18, 2020

Europe in 1989, america in 2020, and the death of the lost cause.

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.

By David W. Blight

July 1, 2020

The messy politics of black voices—and “black voice”—in american animation.

Cartoons have often been considered exempt from the country’s prejudices. In fact, they form a genre built on the marble and mud of racial signification.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

June 30, 2020

After george floyd and juneteenth.

What’s ahead for the movement, the election, and the protesters?

June 20, 2020, juneteenth and the meaning of freedom.

Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.

By Jelani Cobb

June 19, 2020

A memory of solidarity day, on juneteenth, 1968.

The public outpouring over racism that has been taking place in America since George Floyd’s murder feels like a long-postponed renewal of the reckoning that shook the nation more than half a century ago.

By Jon Lee Anderson

June 18, 2020

Seeing police brutality then and now.

We still haven’t fully recognized the art made by twentieth-century black artists.

By Nell Painter

The History of the “Riot” Report

How government commissions became alibis for inaction.

By Jill Lepore

June 15, 2020

The trayvon generation.

For Solo, Simon, Robel, Maurice, Cameron, and Sekou.

By Elizabeth Alexander

So Brutal a Death

Nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s brutal killing by police officers resonates with immigrants, and with people around the world.

By Edwidge Danticat

An American Spring of Reckoning

In death, George Floyd’s name has become a metaphor for the stacked inequities of the society that produced them.

June 14, 2020, the mimetic power of d.c.’s black lives matter mural.

The pavement itself has become part of the protest.

By Kyle Chayka

June 9, 2020

Donald trump’s fascist performance.

To the President, power sounds like gunfire and helicopters; it sounds like the silence of men in uniform when they are asked who they are.

By Masha Gessen

June 3, 2020

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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a civil rights ideal got hijacked.

Supported by

The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked

The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the magazine and is the creator of The 1619 Project. She also teaches race and journalism at Howard University.

Anthony K. Wutoh, the provost of Howard University, was sitting at his desk last July when his phone rang. It was the new dean of the College of Medicine, and she was worried. She had received a letter from a conservative law group called the Liberty Justice Center. The letter warned that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, the school “must cease” any practices or policies that included a “racial component” and said it was notifying medical schools across the country that they must eliminate “racial discrimination” in their admissions. If Howard refused to comply, the letter threatened, the organization would sue.

Listen to this article, read by Janina Edwards

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Wutoh told the dean to send him the letter and not to respond until she heard back from him. Hanging up, he sat there for a moment, still. Then he picked up the phone and called the university’s counsel: This could be a problem.

Like most university officials, Wutoh was not shocked in June when the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century cut affirmative action’s final thin thread. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court invalidated race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Universities across the nation had been preparing for the ruling, trying both to assess potential liabilities and determine the best response.

But Howard is no ordinary university. Chartered by the federal government two years after the Civil War, Howard is one of about 100 historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s. H.B.C.U. is an official government designation for institutions of higher learning founded from the time of slavery through the end of legal apartheid in the 1960s, mostly in the South. H.B.C.U.s were charged with educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants, who for most of this nation’s history were excluded from nearly all of its public and private colleges.

Though Howard has been open to students of all races since its founding in 1867, nearly all of its students have been Black. And so after the affirmative-action ruling, while elite, predominantly white universities fretted about how to keep their Black enrollments from shrinking, Howard (where I am a professor) and other H.B.C.U.s were planning for a potential influx of students who either could no longer get into these mostly white colleges or no longer wanted to try.

Wutoh thought it astounding that Howard — a university whose official government designation and mandate, whose entire reason for existing, is to serve a people who had been systematically excluded from higher education — could be threatened with a lawsuit if it did not ignore race when admitting students. “The fact that we have to even think about and consider what does this mean and how do we continue to fulfill our mission and fulfill the reason why we were founded as an institution and still be consistent with the ruling — I have to acknowledge that we have struggled with this,” he told me. “My broader concern is this is a concerted effort, part of an orchestrated plan to roll back many of the advances of the ’50s and ’60s. I am alarmed. It is absolutely regressive.”

Wutoh has reason to be alarmed. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have filed a flurry of legal challenges and threatened lawsuits against race-conscious programs outside the realm of education, including diversity fellowships at law firms, a federal program to aid disadvantaged small businesses and a program to keep Black women from dying in childbirth. These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.

During the civil rights era, this country passed a series of hard-fought laws to dismantle the system of racial apartheid and to create policies and programs aimed at repairing its harms. Today this is often celebrated as the period when the nation finally triumphed over its original sin of slavery. But what this narrative obscures is that the gains of the civil rights movement were immediately met with a backlash that sought to subvert first the language and then the aims of the movement. Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism. But we have also undergone something far more dangerous: the dismantling of the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to vacillate on remedies for descendants of slavery. And for the last 30 years, the court has almost exclusively ruled in favor of white people in so-called reverse-discrimination cases while severely narrowing the possibility for racial redress for Black Americans. Often, in these decisions, the court has used colorblindness as a rationale that dismisses both the particular history of racial disadvantage and its continuing disparities.

This thinking has reached its legal apotheosis on the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Starting with the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the court found that it wasn’t the segregation of Black and Latino children that was constitutionally repugnant, but the voluntary integration plans that used race to try to remedy it. Six years later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act, which had ensured that jurisdictions could no longer prevent Black Americans from voting because of their race. The act was considered one of the most successful civil rights laws in American history, but Roberts declared that its key provision was no longer needed, saying that “things have changed dramatically.” But a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since the ruling, jurisdictions that were once covered by the Voting Rights Act because of their history of discrimination saw the gap in turnout between Black and white voters grow nearly twice as quickly as in other jurisdictions with similar socioeconomic profiles.

These decisions of the Roberts court laid the legal and philosophical groundwork for the recent affirmative-action case. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involved two of the country’s oldest public and private universities, both of which were financed to a significant degree with the labor of the enslaved and excluded slavery’s descendants for most of their histories. In finding that affirmative action was unconstitutional, Roberts used the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education to make the case that because “the Constitution is colorblind” and “should not permit any distinctions of law based on race or color,” race cannot be used even to help a marginalized group. Quoting the Brown ruling, Roberts argued that “the mere act of ‘separating children’” because of their race generated “ ‘a feeling of inferiority’” among students.

But in citing Brown, Roberts spoke generically of race, rarely mentioning Black people and ignoring the fact that this earlier ruling struck down segregation because race had been used to subordinate them. When Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote those words in 1954, he was not arguing that the use of race harmed Black and white children equally. The use of race in assigning students to schools, Warren wrote, referring to an earlier lower-court decision, had “a detrimental effect upon colored children” specifically, because it was “interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.”

Roberts quickly recited in just a few paragraphs the centuries-long legacy of legal discrimination against Black Americans. Then, as if flicking so many crumbs from the table, he used the circular logic of conservative colorblindness to dispatch that past with a pithy line: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

By erasing the context, Roberts turned colorblindness on its head, reinterpreting a concept meant to eradicate racial caste to one that works against racial justice.

Roberts did not invent this subversion of colorblindness, but his court is constitutionalizing it. While we seem to understand now how the long game of the anti-abortion movement resulted in a historically conservative Supreme Court that last year struck down Roe v. Wade, taking away what had been a constitutional right, Americans have largely failed to see that a parallel, decades-long antidemocratic racial strategy was occurring at the same time. The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

The End of Slavery, and the Instant Backlash

When this country finally eliminated first slavery and then racial apartheid, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which for nearly its entire history wielded race-conscious policies and laws that oppressed and excluded Black Americans, create a society in which race no longer matters? Do we ignore race in order to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms?

Our nation has never been able to resolve this tension. Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

Racial progress in the United States has resulted from rare moments of national clarity, often following violent upheavals like the Civil War and the civil rights movement. At those times, enough white people in power embraced the idea that racial subordination is antidemocratic and so the United States must counter its legacy of racial caste not with a mandated racial neutrality or colorblindness but with sweeping race-specific laws and policies to help bring about Black equality. Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.

This resistance began as soon as slavery ended. After generations of chattel slavery, four million human beings were suddenly being emancipated into a society in which they had no recognized rights or citizenship, and no land, money, education, shelter or jobs. To address this crisis, some in Congress saw in the aftermath of this nation’s deadliest war the opportunity — but also the necessity — for a second founding that would eliminate the system of racial slavery that had been its cause. These men, known as Radical Republicans, believed that making Black Americans full citizens required color-consciousness in policy — an intentional reversal of the way race had been used against Black Americans. They wanted to create a new agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau to serve “persons of African descent” or “such persons as once had been slaves” by providing educational, food and legal assistance, as well as allotments of land taken from the white-owned properties where formerly enslaved people were forced to work.

Understanding that “race” was created to force people of African descent into slavery, their arguments in Congress in favor of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not based on Black Americans’ “skin color” but rather on their condition. Standing on the Senate floor in June 1864, Senator Charles Sumner quoted from a congressional commission’s report on the conditions of freed people, saying, “We need a Freedmen’s Bureau not because these people are Negroes but because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.” Senator Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, declared: “The policy of the states where slavery has existed has been to legislate in its interest. … Now, when slavery no longer exists, the policy of the government must be to legislate in the interest of freedom.” In a speech to Congress, Trumbull compelled “the people of the rebellious states” to be “as zealous and active in the passage of laws and the inauguration of measures to elevate, develop and improve the Negro as they have hitherto been to enslave and degrade him.”

But there were also the first stirrings of an argument we still hear today: that specifically aiding those who, because they were of African descent, had been treated as property for 250 years was giving them preferential treatment. Two Northern congressmen, Martin Kalbfleish, a Dutch immigrant and former Brooklyn mayor, and Anthony L. Knapp, a representative from Illinois, declared that no one would give “serious consideration” to a “bureau of Irishmen’s affairs, a bureau of Dutchmen’s affairs or one for the affairs of those of Caucasian descent generally.” So they questioned why the freedmen should “become these marked objects of special legislation, to the detriment of the unfortunate whites.” Representative Nelson Taylor bemoaned the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which he accused of making a “distinction on account of color between two races.” He argued, “This, sir, is what I call class legislation — legislation for a particular class of the Blacks to the exclusion of all whites.”

Ultimately, the Freedmen’s Bureau bills passed, but only after language was added to provide assistance for poor white people as well. Already, at the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not, that the same Constitution that permitted and protected bondage based on race now required colorblindness to undo its harms.

This logic helped preserve the status quo and infused the responses to other Reconstruction-era efforts that tried to ensure justice and equality for newly freed people. President Andrew Johnson, in vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which sought to grant automatic citizenship to four million Black people whose families for generations had been born in the United States, argued that it “proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners,” who would still be subjected to a naturalization process “in favor of the Negro.” Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, but this idea that unique efforts to address the extraordinary conditions of people who were enslaved or descended from slavery were unfair to another group who had chosen to immigrate to this country foreshadowed the arguments about Asian immigrants and their children that would be echoed 150 years later in Students for Fair Admissions.

As would become the pattern, the collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end. The nation’s first experiment with race-based redress and multiracial democracy was over. In its place, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 ushered in the period of official racial apartheid when it determined that “the enforced separation of the races … neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man … nor denies him the equal protection of the laws.” Over the next six decades, the court condoned an entire code of race law and policies designed to segregate, marginalize, exclude and subjugate descendants of slavery across every realm of American life. The last of these laws would stand until 1968, less than a decade before I was born.

Thurgood Marshall’s Path to Desegregation

In 1930, a young man named Thurgood Marshall, a native son of Baltimore, could not attend the University of Maryland’s law school, located in the city and state where his parents were taxpaying citizens. The 22-year-old should have been a shoo-in for admission. An academically gifted student, Marshall had become enamored with the Constitution after his high school principal punished him for a prank by making him read the founding document. Marshall memorized key parts of the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. After enrolling at Lincoln University, a prestigious Black institution, he joined the debate team and graduated with honors.

But none of that mattered. Only one thing did: Marshall was a descendant of slavery, and Black people, no matter their intellect, ambition or academic record, were barred by law from attending the University of Maryland. Marshall enrolled instead at Howard University Law School, where he studied under the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston, whose belief that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society” had turned the law school into the “West Point of civil rights.”

It was there that Marshall began to see the Constitution as a living document that must adapt to and address the times. He joined with Houston in crafting the strategy that would dismantle legal apartheid. After graduating as valedictorian, in one of his first cases, Marshall sued the University of Maryland. He argued that the school was violating the 14th Amendment, which granted the formerly enslaved citizenship and ensured Black Americans “equal protection under the law,” by denying Black students admission solely because of their race without providing an alternative law school for Black students. Miraculously, he won.

Nearly two decades later, Marshall stood before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that the equal-protection clause enshrined in the 14th Amendment did not abide the use of racial classifications to segregate Black students. Marshall was not merely advancing a generic argument that the Constitution commands blindness to color or race. The essential issue, the reason the 14th Amendment existed, he argued, was not just because race had served as a means of classifying people, but because race had been used to create a system to oppress descendants of slavery — people who had been categorized as Black. Marshall explained that racial classification was being used to enforce an “inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.” The court, he said, “should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.” He sought the elimination of laws requiring segregation, but also the segregation those laws had created.

The Supreme Court, in unanimously striking down school segregation in its Brown decision, did not specifically mention the word “colorblind,” but its ruling echoed the thinking about the 14th Amendment in John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “There is no caste here,” Harlan declared. “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he also made it clear that colorblindness was intended to eliminate the subordination of those who had been enslaved, writing, “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued, “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude.”

The court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not merely a moral statement but a political one. Racial segregation and the violent suppression of democracy among its Black citizens had become a liability for the United States during the Cold War, as the nation sought to stymie Communism’s attraction in non-European nations. Attorney General James P. McGranery submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Truman administration supporting a ruling against school segregation, writing: “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. … Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction , it would inevitably self-replicate.

One can see this in the effort to desegregate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Across the country, North and South, white officials eliminated laws and policies mandating segregation but also did nothing to integrate schools. They maintained unofficial policies of assigning students to schools based on race, adopting so-called race-neutral admissions requirements designed to eliminate most Black applicants from white schools, and they drew school attendance zones snugly around racially segregated neighborhoods. Nearly a decade after Brown v. Board, educational colorblindness stood as the law of the land, and yet no substantial school integration had occurred. In fact, at the start of 1963, in Alabama and Mississippi, two of the nation’s most heavily Black states, not a single Black child attended school with white children.

By the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court grew weary of the ploys. It began issuing rulings trying to enforce actual desegregation of schools. And in 1968, in Green v. New Kent County, the court unanimously decided against a Virginia school district’s “freedom-of-choice plan” that on its face adhered to the colorblind mandate of Brown but in reality led to almost no integration in the district. “The fact that in 1965 the Board opened the doors of the former ‘white’ school to Negro children and of the ‘Negro’ school to white children merely begins, not ends, our inquiry whether the Board has taken steps adequate to abolish its dual, segregated system,” the court determined.

The court ordered schools to use race to assign students, faculty and staff members to schools to achieve integration. Complying with Brown, the court determined, meant the color-conscious conversion of an apartheid system into one without a “ ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” In other words, the reality of racial caste could not be constitutionally subordinated to the ideal of colorblindness. Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy.

Using Race to End Racial Inequality

Hobart Taylor Jr., a successful lawyer who lived in Detroit, was mingling at a party in the nation’s capital in January 1961 to celebrate the inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson as vice president of the United States. Taylor had not had any intention of going to the inauguration, but like Johnson, Taylor was a native son of Texas, and his politically active family were early supporters of Johnson. And so at a personal request from the vice president, Taylor reluctantly found himself amid the din of clinking cocktail glasses when Johnson stopped and asked him to come see him in a few days.

Taylor did not immediately go see Johnson. After a second request came in, in February, Taylor found himself in Johnson’s office. The vice president slid into Taylor’s hands a draft of a new executive order to establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson would lead. This was to be one of President John F. Kennedy’s first steps toward establishing civil rights for Black people.

Taylor’s grandfather had been born into slavery, and yet he and Taylor’s father became highly successful and influential entrepreneurs and landowners despite Texas’ strict color line.

The apartheid society Taylor grew up in was changing, and the vice president of the United States had tapped him to help draft its new rules. How could he say no? Taylor had planned on traveling back to Detroit that night, but instead he checked into the Willard Hotel, where he worked so intently on the draft of the executive order that not only did he forget to eat dinner but also he forgot to tell his wife that he wasn’t coming home. The next day, Taylor worked and reworked the draft for what would become Executive Order 10925, enacted in March 1961.

A few years later, in an interview for the John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Taylor would recall what he considered his most significant contribution. The draft he received said employers had to “take action” to ensure that job applicants and employees would not be discriminated against because of their race, creed, color or national origin. Taylor thought the wording needed a propellant, and so inserted the word “affirmative” in front of action. “I was torn between ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative,’ and I decided ‘affirmative’ on the basis of alliteration,” he said. “And that has, apparently, meant a great deal historically in the way in which people have approached this whole thing.”

Taylor added the word to the order, but it would be the other Texan — a man with a fondness for using the N-word in private — who would most forcefully describe the moral rationale, the societal mandate, for affirmative action. Johnson would push through Congress the 1964, 1965 and 1968 civil rights laws — the greatest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

But a deeply divided Congress did not pass this legislation simply because it realized a century after the Civil War that descendants of slavery deserved equal rights. Black Americans had been engaged in a struggle to obtain those rights and had endured political assassinations, racist murders, bombings and other violence. Segregated and impoverished Black communities across the nation took part in dozens of rebellions, and tanks rolled through American streets. The violent suppression of the democratic rights of its Black citizens threatened to destabilize the country and had once again become an international liability as the United States waged war in Vietnam.

But as this nation’s racist laws began to fall, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In the fall of 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican who was running against President Johnson, gave his first major national speech on civil rights. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins had lambasted Goldwater’s presidential nomination, with King saying his philosophy gave “aid and comfort to racists.” But at a carefully chosen venue — the Conrad Hilton in Chicago — in front of a well-heeled white audience unlikely to spout racist rhetoric, Goldwater savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. “And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation. … Our aim, as I understand it, is not to establish a segregated society or an integrated society. It is to preserve a free society.”

The argument laid out in this speech was written with the help of William H. Rehnquist. As a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Rehnquist pushed for the court to uphold segregation. But in the decade that passed, it became less socially acceptable to publicly denounce equal rights for Black Americans, and Rehnquist began to deploy the language of colorblindness in a way that cemented racial disadvantage.

White Americans who liked the idea of equality but did not want descendants of slavery moving next door to them, competing for their jobs or sitting near their children in school were exceptionally primed for this repositioning. As Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus,” when it came to race, Goldwater believed that white Americans “didn’t have the words to say the truth they knew in their hearts to be right, in a manner proper to the kind of men they wanted to see when they looked in the mirror. Goldwater was determined to give them the words.”

In the end, Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. Then, in June 1965, a few months after Black civil rights marchers were barbarically beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and two months before he would sign the historic Voting Rights Act into law, Johnson, now president of a deeply and violently polarized nation, gave the commencement address at Howard University. At that moment, Johnson stood at the pinnacle of white American power, and he used his platform to make the case that the country owed descendants of slavery more than just their rights and freedom.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Johnson said. “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as if a grander, more just vision of America had taken hold. But while Goldwater did not win the election, 14 years later a case went before the Supreme Court that would signal the ultimate victory of Goldwater’s strategy.

Claiming Reverse Discrimination

Allan Bakke was enjoying a successful career at NASA when he decided he wanted to become a physician. Bakke grew up in a white middle-class family — his father worked for the Post Office, and his mother taught school. Bakke went to the University of Minnesota, where he studied engineering and joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay for college, and then served four years as a Marine, including seven months in Vietnam. It was there that Bakke became enamored with the medical profession. While still working at NASA, he enrolled in night courses to obtain a pre-med degree. In 1972, while he was in his 30s, Bakke applied to 11 medical schools, including at his alma mater, and was rejected by all 11.

One of the schools that Bakke, who was living in California at the time, applied to was the University of California at Davis. The school received 2,664 applications for 100 spots, and by the time he completed his application, most of the seats had already been filled. Some students with lower scores were admitted before he applied, and Bakke protested to the school, claiming that “quotas, open or covert, for racial minorities” had kept him out. His admission file, however, would show that it was his age that was probably a significant strike against him and not his race.

Bakke applied again the next year, and U.C. Davis rejected him again. A friend described Bakke as developing an “almost religious zeal” to fight what he felt was a system that discriminated against white people in favor of so-called minorities. Bakke decided to sue, claiming he had been a victim of “reverse” discrimination.

The year was 1974, less than a decade after Johnson’s speech on affirmative action and a few years after the policy had begun to make its way onto college campuses. The U.C. Davis medical school put its affirmative-action plan in place in 1970. At the time, its first-year medical-school class of 100 students did not include a single Black, Latino or Native student. In response, the faculty designed a special program to boost enrollment of “disadvantaged” students by reserving 16 of the 100 seats for students who would go through a separate admissions process that admitted applicants with lower academic ratings than the general admissions program.

From 1971 to 1974, 21 Black students, 30 Mexican American students and 12 Asian American students enrolled through the special program, while one Black student, six Mexican Americans and 37 Asian American students were admitted through the regular program. Bakke claimed that his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been violated. Though these laws were adopted to protect descendants of slavery from racial discrimination and subordination, Bakke was deploying them to claim that he had been illegally discriminated against because he was white. The case became the first affirmative-action challenge decided by the Supreme Court and revealed just how successful the rhetorical exploitation of colorblindness could be.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for a fractured court in 1978, determined that although the 14th Amendment was written primarily to bridge “the vast distance between members of the Negro race and the white ‘majority,’” the passage of time and the changing demographics of the nation meant the amendment must now be applied universally. In an argument echoing the debates over the Freedmen’s Bureau, Powell said that the United States had grown more diverse, becoming a “nation of minorities,” where “the white ‘majority’ itself is composed of various minority groups, most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination at the hands of the State and private individuals.”

“The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color,” Powell wrote. “If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.” Powell declared that the medical school could not justify helping certain “perceived” victims if it disadvantaged white people who “bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”

But who or what, then, did bear the responsibility?

Bakke was raised in Coral Gables, a wealthy, white suburb of Miami whose segregationist founder proposed a plan to remove all Black people from Miami while serving on the Dade County Planning Board, and where the white elementary school did not desegregate until after it was ordered by a federal court to do so in 1970, the same year U.C. Davis began its affirmative-action program. The court did not contemplate how this racially exclusive access to top neighborhoods and top schools probably helped Bakke to achieve the test scores that most Black students, largely relegated because of their racial designation to resource-deprived segregated neighborhoods and educational facilities, did not. It did not mean Bakke didn’t work hard, but it did mean that he had systemic advantages over equally hard-working and talented Black people.

For centuries, men like Powell and Bakke had benefited from a near-100 percent quota system, one that reserved nearly all the seats at this nation’s best-funded public and private schools and most-exclusive public and private colleges, all the homes in the best neighborhoods and all the top, well-paying jobs in private companies and public agencies for white Americans. Men like Bakke did not acknowledge the systemic advantages they had accrued because of their racial category, nor all the ways their race had unfairly benefited them. More critical, neither did the Supreme Court. As members of the majority atop the caste system, racial advantage transmitted invisibly to them. They took notice of their race only when confronted with a new system that sought to redistribute some of that advantage to people who had never had it.

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

Yet at the same time Powell was drafting this ruling, cases of recalcitrant school districts still refusing to integrate Black children were making their way to the Supreme Court. Just 15 years earlier, the federal government called up National Guardsmen to ensure that handfuls of Black students could enroll in white schools.

Indeed, Powell wrote this opinion while sitting on the same court as Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first Black justice in the Supreme Court’s 178-year history. In Brown, Marshall helped break the back of legalized segregation. Now, as the court deliberated the Bakke case, a frustrated Marshall sent around a two-and-a-half-page typed memo to the other justices. “I repeat, for next to the last time: The decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students,” he wrote. “If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation’s sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of slavery and state imposed segregation by ‘root and branch.’ If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of ‘quotas’ which violates the principle that the ‘Constitution is color-blind.’”

When Marshall’s arguments did not persuade enough justices, he joined with three others in a dissent from a decision that he saw as actively reversing, and indeed perverting, his legacy. They issued a scathing rebuke to the all-white majority, accusing them of letting “colorblindness become myopia, which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”

Marshall also wrote his own dissent, where he ticked off statistic after statistic that revealed the glaring disparities between descendants of slavery and white Americans in areas like infant and maternal mortality, unemployment, income and life expectancy. He argued that while collegiate diversity was indeed a compelling state interest, bringing Black Americans into the mainstream of American life was much more urgent, and that failing to do so would ensure that “America will forever remain a divided society.”

Marshall called out the court’s hypocrisy. “For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution, as interpreted by this court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”

At the end of his lengthy dissent, Marshall pointed out what had become the court’s historic pattern. “After the Civil War, our government started ‘affirmative action’ programs. This court … destroyed the movement toward complete equality,” he wrote. As he said, “I fear that we have come full circle.”

The Reagan Rollback

In 1980, having just secured the Republican nomination for the presidency, Ronald Reagan traveled to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair to give an address. It was there in that county, a mere 16 years earlier, that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klansmen, among the most notorious killings of the civil rights era.

Standing in front of a roaring crowd of about 10,000 white Mississippians, Reagan began his general-election campaign. He did not mention race. He did not need to. Instead he spoke of states’ rights, replicating the language of Confederates and segregationists, to signal his vision for America.

Despite the Bakke ruling, affirmative action continued to gain ground in the 1970s, with a deeply divided Supreme Court upholding limited affirmative action in hiring and other areas, and the Jimmy Carter administration embracing race-conscious policies. But Reagan understood the political power of white resistance to these policies, which if allowed to continue and succeed would redistribute opportunity in America.

Once in office, Reagan aggressively advanced the idea that racial-justice efforts had run amok, that Black Americans were getting undeserved racial advantages across society and that white Americans constituted the primary victims of discrimination.

A 1985 New York Times article noted that the Reagan administration was “intensifying its legal attack on affirmative action” across American life, saying the administration “has altered the government’s definition of racial discrimination.” As early as the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white. Reagan’s administration claimed that race-conscious remedies were illegal and that hiring goals for Black Americans were “a form of racism” and as abhorrent as the “separate but equal” doctrine struck down by Brown v. Board.

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

But as the sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote, “Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true.” Reagan deftly provided the road map to the nation’s racial future. Tapping into white aversion to acknowledging and addressing the singular crimes committed against Black Americans, conservatives, who had not long before championed and defended racial segregation, now commandeered the language of colorblindness, which had been used to dismantle the impacts of legal apartheid. They wrapped themselves in the banner of rhetorical equality while condemning racial-justice activists as the primary perpetrators of racism.

“There’s this really concerted, strategic effort to communicate to white people that racial justice makes white people victims, and that when people demand racial justice, they don’t actually mean justice; they mean revenge,” Ian Haney López, a race and constitutional law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Black people are treated as if they are just any other Americans. There is no history of racial subordination associated with Black people. There is no structural or systemic racism against African Americans. By 1989, it’s over. Reactionary colorblindness has won.”

Diversity vs. Redress

Perhaps no single person has more successfully wielded Reagan’s strategy than Edward Blum. In 1992, Blum, who made his living as a stockbroker, decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a Texas district carved out to ensure Black representation. Blum was trounced by the Black Democratic candidate. He and several others sued, arguing that a consideration of racial makeup when creating legislative districts violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Despite the fact that until a 1944 Supreme Court ruling, Texas had selected candidates through all-white primaries, and the fact that the district had been created in part in response to the state’s history of Black-voter suppression, Blum’s side won the case, forcing a redrawing of legislative districts in a manner that diluted Black and Latino voting power. Since that victory, Blum has mounted a decades-long campaign that has undermined the use of race to achieve racial justice across American life.

Blum is not a lawyer, but his organizations, funded by a mostly anonymous cadre of deep-pocketed conservatives, have been wildly effective. It is Blum, for instance, who was the strategist behind the case against the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court again narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions in the early 2000s, Blum set his sights on killing it altogether. In that 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion preserving limited affirmative action but putting universities on notice by setting an arbitrary timeline for when the court should determine that enough racial justice will have been achieved. “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student-body diversity in the context of public higher education,” O’Connor wrote. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The use of the term “racial preferences” is key here. Instead of a policy created to even the playing field for a people who had been systematically held back and still faced pervasive discrimination, affirmative action was cast as a program that punished white Americans by giving unfair preferential treatment to Black Americans.

Blum didn’t wait 25 years to challenge affirmative action. His case brought on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a soft-spoken white woman who sued the University of Texas at Austin, after she was denied admission, went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ultimately upheld the university’s admissions program. In his second attempt, Blum changed tactics. As he told a gathering of the Houston Chinese Alliance in 2015: “I needed Asian plaintiffs.” In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Blum’s group argued, and the court agreed, that affirmative-action programs discriminated against Asian Americans and, at the University of North Carolina, also white students. But many saw Blum’s use of another historically marginalized group in the lawsuit as an attempt to neutralize any argument that those targeting affirmative action opposed racial equality.

Blum’s success relied on defining affirmative action as a program about “visual diversity,” treating race as a mere collection of physical traits and not a social construct used to subordinate and stigmatize. When colleges seek diversity, he said, they are “really talking about skin-color diversity. How somebody looks. What’s your skin color? What’s the shape of your eyes? What’s the texture of your hair? Most Americans don’t think that the shape of your eyes tells us much about who you are as an individual. What does your skin color tell the world about who you are as an individual?” This reasoning resounds for many Americans who have also come to think about race simply as what you see.

Blum has described racial injustice against Black Americans as a thing of the past — a “terrible scar” on our history. As he awaited the court’s ruling last April, Blum told The Christian Science Monitor that today’s efforts to address that past were discriminatory and in direct conflict with the colorblind goals of Black activism. He said that “an individual’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help that individual or harm that individual in their life’s endeavors” and that affirmative action was “in grave tension with the founding principles of our civil rights movement.” But the civil rights movement has never been about merely eliminating race or racism; it’s also about curing its harms, and civil rights groups oppose Blum’s efforts.

Yet progressives, too, have unwittingly helped to maintain the corrupt colorblind argument that Blum has employed so powerfully, in part because the meaning of affirmative action was warped nearly from its beginning by the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in Bakke. When the court determined that affirmative-action programs could stand only for “diversity” and not for redress, many advocates and institutions, in order to preserve these programs, embraced the idea that the goal of affirmative action was diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice. Progressive organizations adopted the lexicon of “people of color” when discussing affirmative-action programs and also flattened all African-descended people into a single category, regardless of their particular lineage or experience in the United States.

Campuses certainly became more “diverse” as admissions offices focused broadly on recruiting students who were not white. But the descendants of slavery, for whom affirmative action originated, remain underrepresented among college students, especially at selective colleges and universities. At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.

So, at least on this one thing, Blum is right. Many institutions have treated affirmative-action programs as a means of achieving visual diversity. Doing so has weakened the most forceful arguments for affirmative action, which in turn has weakened public support for such policies. Institutions must find ways, in the wake of the affirmative-action ruling, to address the racism that Black people face no matter their lineage. But using affirmative action as a diversity program — or a program to alleviate disadvantage that any nonwhite person faces — has in actuality played a part in excluding the very people for whom affirmative action and other racial redress programs were created to help.

Taking Back the Intent of Affirmative Action

Just as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund used the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a legal catalyst for eliminating apartheid in all American life, Blum and those of like mind intend to use the affirmative-action ruling to push a sweeping regression in the opposite direction: bringing down this nation’s racial-justice programs and initiatives.

Right after the June ruling, 13 Republican state attorneys general sent letters to 100 of the nation’s biggest companies warning that the affirmative-action ruling prohibits what they call “discriminating on the basis of race, whether under the label of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or otherwise. Treating people differently because of the color of their skin, even for benign purposes, is unlawful and wrong.” Companies that engage in such racial discrimination, the letter threatened, would “face serious legal consequences.”

The letter points to racial-justice and diversity-and-inclusion programs created or announced by companies, particularly after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. In response to the killing, a multigenerational protest movement arose and faced violent suppression by law enforcement as it sought to force this nation to see that the descendants of slavery were still suffering and deserved repair. Corporations took a public stance on racial justice, vowing to integrate everything from their boardrooms to their suppliers. Monuments to white supremacists and Confederates that had stood for 100 years were finally vanquished from the public square. And many colleges and other institutions vocally committed to racial justice as an ethos.

But that fragile multiracial coalition — which for a period understood racial redress as a national good needed to secure and preserve our democracy — has been crushed by the same forces that have used racial polarization to crush these alliances in the past. Conservatives have spent the four years since George Floyd’s murder waging a so-called war against “woke” — banning books and curriculums about racism, writing laws that eliminate diversity-and-inclusion programs and prohibiting the teaching of courses even at the college level that are deemed racially “divisive.”

In other words, conservatives have used state power to prepare a citizenry to accept this new American legal order by restricting our ability to understand why so much racial inequality exists, particularly among the descendants of slavery, and why programs like affirmative action were ever needed in the first place.

“Something really stunning and dangerous that has happened during the Trump era is that the right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice,” Haney López told me. “This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked.”

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Despite these realities, conservative groups are initiating a wave of attacks on racial-equality programs. About 5 percent of practicing attorneys are Black, and yet one of Blum’s groups, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sued law firms to stop their diversity fellowships. In August, it also sued the Fearless Fund, a venture-capital firm founded by two Black women, which through its charitable arm helps other Black women gain access to funding by giving small grants to businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by Black women. Even though according to the World Economic Forum, Black women receive just 0.34 percent of venture-capital funds in the United States, Blum declared the fund to be racially discriminatory. Another Blum group, Students for Fair Admissions, has now sued the U.S. Military Academy, even though the Supreme Court allowed race-conscious admissions to stand in the military. Another organization, the Center for Individual Rights, has successfully overturned a decades-long Small Business Administration policy that automatically treated so-called minority-owned businesses as eligible for federal contracts for disadvantaged businesses.

Last year, a group called the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued the City and County of San Francisco over their funding of several programs aimed at eliminating disparities Black Americans face, including the Abundant Birth Project, which gives stipends for prenatal care, among other supports, to Black women and Pacific Islanders to help prevent them from dying during childbirth. Even though maternal mortality for Black women in the United States is up to four times as high as it is for white women, conservatives argue that programs specifically helping the women most likely to die violate the 14th Amendment. Even as this lawsuit makes its way through the courts, there are signs of why these sorts of programs remain necessary: It was announced last year that the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for allegations of racism against Black mothers following the death of a Black woman who went there to give birth.

It is impossible to look at the realities of Black life that these programs seek to address and come to the conclusion that the lawsuits are trying to make society more fair or just or free. Instead they are foreclosing the very initiatives that could actually make it so.

And nothing illuminates that more than the conservative law group’s letter warning Howard — an institution so vaunted among Black Americans that it’s known as the Mecca — that its medical school must stop any admissions practices that have a “racial component.” Howard’s medical school, founded in 1868, remains one of just four historically Black medical schools in the United States. Howard received nearly 9,000 medical-school applicants for 130 open seats in 2023. And while almost all of the students who apply to be Howard undergraduates are Black, because there are so few medical-school slots available, most applicants to Howard’s medical school are not. Since the school was founded to serve descendants of slavery with a mission to educate “disadvantaged students for careers in medicine,” however, most of the students admitted each year are Black.

That has now made it a target, even though Black Americans account for only 5 percent of all U.S. doctors, an increase of just three percentage points in the 46 years since Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke. Despite affirmative action at predominantly white schools, at least 70 percent of the Black doctors and dentists in America attended an H.B.C.U. H.B.C.U.s also have produced half of the Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and a quarter of Black graduates in STEM fields.

Even Plessy v. Ferguson, considered perhaps the worst Supreme Court ruling in U.S. history, sanctioned the existence of H.B.C.U.s and other Black-serving organizations. If institutions like Howard or the Fearless Fund cannot work to explicitly assist the descendants of slavery, who still today remain at the bottom of nearly every indicator of success and well-being, then we have decided as a nation that there is nothing we should do to help Black Americans achieve equality and that we will remain a caste society.

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. As history has shown, maintaining racial inequality requires constant repression and is therefore antithetical to democracy. And so we must be clear about the stakes: Our nation teeters at the brink of a particularly dangerous moment, not just for Black Americans but for democracy itself.

To meet the moment, our society must forcefully recommit to racial justice by taking lessons from the past. We must reclaim the original intent of affirmative-action programs stretching all the way back to the end of slavery, when the Freedmen’s Bureau focused not on race but on status, on alleviating the conditions of those who had endured slavery. Diversity matters in a diverse society, and American democracy by definition must push for the inclusion of all marginalized people. But remedies for injustice also need to be specific to the harm.

So we, too, must shift our language and, in light of the latest affirmative-action ruling, focus on the specific redress for descendants of slavery . If Yale, for instance, can apologize for its participation in slavery, as it did last month, then why can’t it create special admissions programs for slavery’s descendants — a program based on lineage and not race — just as it does for its legacy students? Corporations, government programs and other organizations could try the same.

Those who believe in American democracy, who want equality, must no longer allow those who have undermined the idea of colorblindness to define the terms. Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it may also be the only means of preserving our democracy.

Race-based affirmative action has died. The fight for racial justice need not. It cannot.

Top photo illustration by Mark Harris. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. More about Nikole Hannah-Jones

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