Race Discrimination

The Supreme Court handed a major victory to voting rights plaintiffs on May 22, with a decision that struck down the boundaries of two congressional districts in North Carolina as impermissibly effecting race discrimination.  Cooper v. Harris, with a majority decision written by Justice Kagan, takes aim at the practice of diluting the power of minority voters by “packing” them into concentrated voting districts. Critics of the districts argued that their design had reduced the number of North Carolina districts that could potentially swing Democratic. (Eighty-seven percent of black voters nationwide identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic in 2016.) Although the Court struck down unanimously the borders of North Carolina’s District 1, it voted 5-3 to strike down the state’s District 12. In the wake of the 2010 census, Republican legislators increased the District 12’s proportion of black voters to 50.7 percent, up from 43.8 percent. The state lawmakers argued that they increased the district’s black voters to provide Republicans with a partisan advantage, a line of reasoning rejected by the Court: “The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics,” wrote Justice Kagan in her majority opinion. […]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bank of America v. City of Miami (decided the same day as a companion case, Wells Fargo and Co. et al. v. City of Miami, Florida) has been declared a mixed bag by many legal commentators. While the Court confirmed years of precedence in finding that cities, like Miami, have standing to sue under the Fair Housing Act (FHA), the Court also clarified that cities seeking damages must meet a high burden in showing that their injuries were caused by alleged discrimination. Municipalities seeking redress for harm caused by housing discrimination should certainly be encouraged by the Court’s decision – and they should seek ways to build a tight case for causation if they want to be successful. The Miami case was just one of many filed by municipalities in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis in an attempt to recover from the financial impact of widespread foreclosures.  The FHA, with its broad purpose to “provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States” provided the statutory basis for the cities’ lawsuits.   Many of these cases were based on a theory of “reverse redlining;” in addition to traditional redlining where prospective minority home buyers […]

More than 90% of employers rely on criminal background checks to make hiring decisions, but this common practice raises numerous concerns.  First, there are practical issues about whether background checks actually provide employers with meaningful information.  For example, recent research indicates that after a certain amount of time, individuals who have committed a crime are no more likely to re-offend than an individual without a criminal record.  Further, criminal records are frequently plagued with inaccuracies that are difficult for an individual to correct, and many individuals apply for jobs without knowing their records contain errors.  These issues, among others, suggest that employers who prohibit people with certain criminal records may be needlessly turning away qualified candidates and denying job seekers a meaningful chance to rebuild their lives. In addition to these practical concerns, the use of background checks and prohibitions against hiring individuals with criminal records may, under certain circumstances, constitute race discrimination and violate state and local laws.  Indeed, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – the agency tasked with enforcing certain federal laws that prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – has long recognized that the use of arrest and conviction records in […]

Sometimes lost in the discussion about the wage gap between male and female workers is the role of race. Though white women earn a mere 78% of what their male counterparts earn in America, the gap is far greater for women of color. African American women earn 64%, American Indian women earn 59%, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders earn 65%, and Latina women earn only 54% of white men’s earnings. Asian American women face the slimmest wage gap, with their earnings representing 90% of white men’s earnings. Factors such as education do play a role, as lower high school and college graduation rates for African American and Latina women do cause a decrease in earning potential. However, women of color generally earn less than white women even when they have the same educational background, suggesting that other factors must play a role. This disparity is just one example of how inextricably linked race and gender are for women of color.  Women of color face a three-headed monster when it comes to discrimination. In addition to the more general gender discrimination issues faced by both white women and women of color, women of color face race-based biases faced by minorities of both genders and […]

Recently, the California Supreme Court posthumously granted Hong Yen Chang admission to the California Bar – reversing a 125-year-old decision that denied his application because of his race and national origin. (Read the Court’s decision here; read more about the case here, here, and here.) Chang was born in China and immigrated to the United States in 1872. He graduated from Andover, Yale, and Columbia Law School, and in 1888 gained admission to the New York bar. When he moved to California, however, the State Supreme Court rejected his application for bar admission. Although a New York judge had issued Chang a naturalization certificate in 1888, the California Court found that certificate void under the Chinese Exclusion Act—a now-infamous federal law which banned Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens and halted immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. (Read more about the 1882 Exclusion Act and its subsequent renewal and expansion here, here, and here). Since only United States Citizens and those with a “bona fide . . . intention to become such” were eligible for admission to the California bar in 1890, the Court denied Chang’s application. In this week’s opinion, the Court called its 1890 decision “a grievous wrong.” Expounding upon the decision’s historical context, the […]

This summer, an estimated 130,000 visitors descended upon an abandoned, soon-to-be-demolished sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to take in the latest exhibit by renowned artist-slash-provocateur Kara Walker. Housed in the historic Domino Sugar Refinery, the exhibit was titled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” A tribute to the historical struggles of African-American women, Walker’s work also serves as a poignant reminder of the subtle ways in which those struggles morph, but continue to persist, over time. I was one of the many people who lined up for, and found myself awed by, the exhibit one weekend afternoon in June. The centerpiece (the titular “Sugar Baby”) was a 35-foot-tall, sugar-coated “sphinx turned mammy,” complete with an exaggerated physique and an “Aunt Jemima” kerchief on her head. Several smaller sculptures – resin-coated children carrying baskets of bananas and other ware – were scattered throughout the periphery of the warehouse. On the day I visited the factory, many of the smaller sculptures had started to melt; their withered, amputated and truncated […]