Alan Freeman, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine

This article analyzes supreme court cases dealing with questions of racial discrimination from 1954 to 1989 to argue that anti-discrimination law was guided by what the author calls a ‘perpetrator perspective’ rather than a ‘victim perspective’, focussing on de jure segregation rather than de facto segregation, formal equality rather than substantive equality, or what some might call ‘equality of opportunity’ rather than ‘equality of outcome’. Thus ironically, antidiscrimination law becomes the mechanism through which discrimination is advanced and legitimized!