Safeguarding minority rights in the US

U.S. Supreme Court began to ban laws that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin in 1950s. Fair treatment of minorities is one of a nation’s most fundamental and vexing responsibilities [1-3].
When a country decides to stop discriminating against disadvantaged people or ethnic minorities, preferential treatment is necessary to reverse the impact of prior inequities. Because of the strong cultural opposition to change, complete integration may appear impossible when target groups are a numerical minority or have distinctive physical traits [4-6].
John F. Kennedy once remarked that when one man’s rights are in danger, “no one’s rights are weakened.” Support for campaigns to safeguard minorities and underprivileged groups has been aided by practical self-interest. On the occasion of the Emancipation Proclamation’s 50th anniversary, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” address [7-9].
The major clause of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, unequivocally declared that no state may adopt or carry out such law. In the Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, African Americans were deemed to be non-citizens. African Americans were also given protection from slavery and voting discrimination throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction [10-12].
Justices have drawn a separate line between de facto and de jure segregation. Justices have given courts broad remedial powers in matters involving school desegregation. In Sweatt v. Painter, it was decided that a state law school for black students was inferior to the all-white University of Texas [13, 14].
Before the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, state laws prohibiting women from voting were frequently sustained by the courts. John Avlon: Hispanics have experienced a similar lack of integration into American culture. He claims that discrimination against them has increased due to linguistic hurdles and worries about immigration. Avlon argues that race and not sex should be the basis for how the government distributes benefits and costs [15, 16].
The US has been cautious in forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Many localities, counties, or states have made it illegal to classify people according to their sexual inclinations. The Supreme Court rejected labeling employment age discrimination as “quasi-suspect.” However, Congress has enacted a number of safeguards against age discrimination [17-19].
Critics said that affirmative action constituted unlawful “reverse discrimination.” Federal affirmative action programs should be given more judicial deference than their state and local counterparts, according to Justices Burger and Rehnquist. In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), the court majority determined that both federal and state agreements needed to undergo the same level of thorough judicial review [20, 21].
Court cases, Congress, and state legislatures have been the main arenas in which the fight to end discrimination against minorities in the United States has been waged. She lists the rule of law and individual equality as the two causes of success. She contends that despite their antipathy for particular groups, Americans are forced to confront their biases because they believe in individual equality [22, 23].
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                References
[1] H. Ball, The Bakke case: Race, education, and affirmative action. Landmark Law Cases & American, 2000.
[2] D. S. Massey, Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.
[3] M. J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement: Abridged edition of from Jim Crow to civil rights: The Supreme Court and the struggle for racial equality. Oxford University Press, 2007.
[4] G. C. Loury, “Why should we care about group inequality?,” Social philosophy and policy, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 249-271, 1987.
[5] J. R. Feagin, “The continuing significance of race: Antiblack discrimination in public places,” in The Inequality Reader: Routledge, 2018, pp. 269-275.
[6] M. O. Hunt, “African American, Hispanic, and white beliefs about black/white inequality, 1977-2004,” American Sociological Review, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 390-415, 2007.
[7] I. L. Janis, Groupthink. Houghton Mifflin Boston, 1983.
[8] E. V. Lei and K. D. Miller, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s” I Have a Dream” in Context: Ceremonial Protest and African American Jeremiad,” College English, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 83-99, 1999.
[9] M. Kakutani, “The lasting power of Dr. King’s Dream speech,” The New York Times, vol. 27, 2013.
[10] B. Meyler, “The Gestation of Birthright Citizenship, 1868-1898 States’ Rights, the Law of Nations, and Mutual Consent,” Geo. Immigr. LJ, vol. 15, p. 519, 2000.
[11] J. B. Raskin, “Legal aliens, local citizens: the historical, constitutional and theoretical meanings of alien suffrage,” U. Pa. L. Rev., vol. 141, p. 1391, 1992.
[12] I. Wurman, “Subsidiarity and Fundamental Rights Protection in the United States,” CEJCL, vol. 3, p. 241, 2022.
[13] F. I. Goodman, “De facto school segregation: A constitutional and empirical analysis,” Calif. L. Rev., vol. 60, p. 275, 1972.
[14] J. A. Raffel, Historical dictionary of school segregation and desegregation: The American experience. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998.
[15] M. L. Stearns, P. A. Monopoli, L. S. Gibson, R. Koulish, and D. J. Maher, “Constitution Day Lectures,” 2016.
[16] D. Maher, M. L. Stearns, L. S. Gibson, P. A. Monopoli, and R. Koulish, “Constitution Day Lectures: Election 2016 and the Structural Constitution,” 2016.
[17] W. N. Eskridge and W. N. Eskridge, Gaylaw: Challenging the apartheid of the closet. Harvard University Press, 2009.
[18] J. D. Wilets, “Conceptualizing private violence against sexual minorities as gendered violence: An international and comparative law perspective,” Alb. L. Rev., vol. 60, p. 989, 1996.
[19] E. N. Ruggs, M. R. Hebl, C. Law, C. B. Cox, M. V. Roehling, and R. L. Wiener, “Gone fishing: I–O psychologists’ missed opportunities to understand marginalized employees’ experiences with discrimination,” Industrial and organizational psychology, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 39-60, 2013.
[20] R. D. Kahlenberg, “Class-based affirmative action,” Cal L. Rev., vol. 84, p. 1037, 1996.
[21] W. M. Leiter and S. Leiter, “Affirmative action in antidiscrimination law and policy: An overview and synthesis,” 2011.
[22] A. R. Pierce, “US “partnership” with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its effect on civil society and human rights,” Society, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 68-86, 2014.
[23] P. Swain, “The lived experiences of US female employees who encountered gender-based wage disparity,” Capella University, 2019.
 

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