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Did “Positive Discrimination” Kill Affirmative Action?
Political theorists make distinctions between negative and positive rights. A negative right is when a person can freely do something without interference from the government. A positive right requires the government to provide a person with something at the expense of another.
Affirmative Action applied a similar distinction to discrimination.
Discrimination is not inherently harmful. It simply means to distinguish. Negative discrimination, on the other hand, is creating a differentiation against a person based on the group to which that person belongs rather than on the person’s particular qualities.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, and national origin, but its primary goal was to eliminate negative discrimination against black Americans.
The Civil Rights Act was in agreement with the opposing argument in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which established segregation. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or his color when his civil rights, as…