Law Commons^™

A Post-Race Equal Protection?, Trina Jones, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky

Faculty Scholarship

Most vividly demonstrated in the 2008 election of the first African-American President of the United States, post-race is a term that has been widely used to characterize a belief in the declining significance of race in the United States. Post-racialists, then, believe that racial discrimination is rare and aberrant behavior as evidenced by America’s pronounced racial progress. One practical consequence of a commitment to post-racialism is the belief that governments - both state and federal - should not consider race in their decision making. One might imagine that the recent explosion in post-racial discourse also portends a revised understanding of …