Humanities Definitions

Vocabulary flashcards of key terms from the lecture notes.

Racialization

Ascribing negative meanings to bodily markers so as to legitimize a pattern of domination

Discrimination

An action, practice, policy that imposes a relative disadvantage on at least one individual based on their perceived membership to some salient social group

Ascriptive Status Groups

Groups with most/all features: informal, involuntary, closed, socially constructed, socially salient, stigmatized, systematically disadvantaged, identity groups

Corrective Justice

Compensating for past wrongs to the greatest extent possible, restoring the status quo and nullifying effect of some past unjust facts (Aristotle)

Distributive Justice

Proportional understanding of equality, receiving benefits to the proportion of your merit (Aristotle)

Deracialization

Elimination of race as a cognitive category enmeshed with a status hierarchy; goal not to make race invisible but to make it irrelevant by de-correlating race and class through affirmative action

Subtyping

Process through which counter-stereotypical group members are redefined as being outside of the group all together

Colorblindness (CB1)

An actual condition, an existing mental or social state, where there is non-perception of race, a genuine ignorance of race

Colorblindness (CB2)

An immediately valid and legally binding principle according to which you should act as if you had CB1

Affirmative Action

Redistributive, group focused, disadvantage focused, and discrimination focused to correct statistical under-representation. It varies on 5 parameters: legal underpinnings, flexibility of instruments used, domain of implementation, criteria based on which the group that benefits are identified and justification.

Socially Salient Groups

Groups with whose position and esteem in society the individual is inextricably involved

Being ‘passing’

Process through which an individual manages to present themselves as white and be accepted as such

Segregation

Activity/process describes the de-jure assignment of individuals to different geographical or institutional units based on membership to a specific group, while predicament is the distributive pattern where members of different groups end up in different portions of a distributive space.

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

Invalidated ‘separate but equal’ but only in educational domain, based on study by Kenneth Clarke

Short-term failure

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

While race could be a factor in college admissions, quotas were unconstitutional.

Miliken v. Bradley, 1974

Ruled that buses were only allowed in their school district, overturned Swann and validated ‘white flight’ to suburbs

Plessy v Ferguson, 1896

Upheld constitutionality of racial segregation laws with pseudo-liberal argument

‘Separate but equal’ doctrine as main argument, equality reduced to formal symmetry

Desegregating cases after Brown

Green, 1968 →school boards had an affirmative duty to convert the school system into an integrated one

Swann, 1971 → busing was constitutional as a means of desegregating schools

Keyes, 1973 → Ruled that de facto segregation had affected a substantial part of the school system and illegal

Grutter v. Bollinger // Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003

More specific AA program was made unconstitutional (Gratz), while a broader one was left as constitutional (Grutter)

Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions

Affirmative Action in the UK

1976 Race Relations Act → employers allowed to encourage racial minorities to apply and grant them particular access to materials/services for training

Race-based positive discrimination forbidden → no group trauma of slavery

Affirmative Action in France

Religion more impactful than race but many obstacles to French AA (Constitution, color-blindness, parity justification, etc)

Indirect AA is very common but hidden → use of place as a proxy for race

North Ireland exception

2000 Police Employment Act → strict religious quotas in police employment → only instance of strict quotas in European law

Exception because of huge violence (“The Troubles”) in the 70s and huge level discrimination face by minority group