This week, the United States Supreme Court will consider a number of cases that address the legacies of the civil rights movement and the institutional legacies of what the movement sought to change. Of particular interest is a so-called “reverse discrimination” case in Connecticut, where white firefighters sued when they missed out on promotions because no blacks would have won advancement.
The suit gets at the tricky question of minority performance on standardized tests–such tests may not be designed to discriminate (like literacy tests or poll taxes), but the result discriminates nonetheless.
This case and others come before a Supreme Court increasingly invested in the language of colorblindness. Chief Justice John Roberts, in the news most recently for flubbing the swearing-in of our first black president, said of one voting rights case, “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Indeed. All the more reason to challenge the renewal of the 1965 Civil Rights Act (right, Texas?).