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Civil Rights and Discrimination

Selected Works

Selected Works

2019

Diversity

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Racial Indirection, Yuvraj Joshi Apr 2019

Racial Indirection, Yuvraj Joshi

Yuvraj Joshi

Racial indirection describes practices that produce racially disproportionate results without the overt use of race. This Article demonstrates how racial indirection has allowed — and may continue to allow — efforts to desegregate America’s universities. By analyzing the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases, the Article shows how specific features of affirmative action doctrine have required and incentivized racial indirection, and how these same features have helped sustain the constitutionality of affirmative action to this point. There is a basic constitutional principle that emerges from these cases: so long as the end is constitutionally permissible, the less direct the reliance on …

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Rhetorical Neutrality: Colorblindness, Frederick Douglass, And Inverted Critical Race Theory, Cedric Merlin Powell Feb 2019

Rhetorical Neutrality: Colorblindness, Frederick Douglass, And Inverted Critical Race Theory, Cedric Merlin Powell

Cedric M. Powell

Rhetorical Neutrality refers to the middle ground approach adopted by the Supreme Court in its race jurisprudence. This Article examines rhetorical neutrality as evinced in the narratives espoused in the opinions of Justices O'Connor and Thomas. In Grutter, both Justices employ neutral approaches, rooted in colorblindness. However, the underlying rhetoric, or how their reasoning is expressed in their respective opinions, is strikingly distinct. Neither Justice advances a remedial approach; both Justices start with the premise that race is inherently suspect, but their approaches diverge because they view colorblind neutrality in fundamentally distinct ways.

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