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The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so. In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.
Can anyone think of such a country to use as a test case?
I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws, but also that they don't collect data on race, so it might not be possible to use them as a comparison.
I'm not sure why another country is necessary for this comparison. It's not like the Civil Rights Act is some long-defunct law under which no one actually brings suit. To the best of my understanding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, various Department of Justice entities, and private plaintiffs all still bring suit under it and win. This suggests that, by the terms of the law, racial discrimination is happening in America today. Surely there are some people on the margin who would discriminate if it was legal but won't discriminate if it isn't. This seems at least empirically true. The amount of racial discrimination today is almost surely lower now than it was before the Civil Rights Act.
There are two main components of civil rights law that the online right dislikes. There's the nondiscrimination part of the Civil Rights Act (which is interpreted to mean that pro-black or other progressive-favored group discrimination is OK even if it discriminates against other groups) and there's the disparate impact standard, which makes everything from enforcing laws against murder to MIT open courseware illegal depending on your interpretation. The disparate impact part is indefensible IMO, it's just a poorly thought out law that shouldn't exist. The nondiscrimination part would be perceived very differently if it was simply interpreted the way it was written, but it isn't.
Disparate impact is not, notably, part of the law itself.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2 under (k) as Nybbler said.
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