Equality and Impasse: Mobilizing Group-Based Perspectives in an Era of Group-Blindness

• Published in: Redefining Equality
• Main Author: Abrams, Kathryn
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Oxford University Press 29.01.1998
• Subjects: African American History; Law and Society; Moral Philosophy; actors; institutional; complex; broad; discrimination
• ISBN: 019511664X; 9780195116649
• DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195116649.003.0002

For more than a decade, critical legal commentators have observed a tension between doctrinal understandings of equality and the perspectives of outsider, or victim, groups. This tension has grown into frank divergence as “color-blindness” has become a constitutional sword, used to dismantle governmental programs from state and federal set-asides to “safe” minority electoral districts. Underlying this tension is a conflict not simply about the nature of discrimination but about a range of related concepts: namely, the meaning, dynamics, and consequences of group membership, in which “group” connotes those connected by race, sex, or other largely inalienable characteristic that has assumed social salience. This essay will trace the escalating tension between doctrinal understandings and outsiders ’ understandings of these concepts. It will then ask how the law might accommodate outsiders ’ understandings of “group-ness” and group-based discrimination, at a time when mainstream constitutional doctrine prevents institutional actors from considering the social consequences-indeed the very fact-of group membership.