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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.
America, 1963.
One can argue that in current year the demand for racism outstrips the supply, and maybe you think that modern society's anti-racism is robust enough that we no longer need laws to make everyone behave... But it is trivially true that America did need those laws, Americans were (and to a lesser extent, still are) willing to discriminate against people based on race. It is also probably true that such laws have played a major role in America becoming a society that shunned racism.
This didn't seem right to me, a quick google search turned this up. maybe you are thinking of 'positive discrimination', which it appears France does not have.
How did France avoid "position discrimination" if we got saddled with it? Do they not have a Supreme Court powerful enough to do the equivalent of the Griggs v. Duke ruling?
I'm not sure what you mean by "position discrimination", I said "positive discrimination" i.e. affirmative action, intentionally discriminating in favor of ethnic minorities. This does not appear to be legal in France.
Not familiar, but having looked at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with positive discrimination. But, it would not surprise me if France had something similar Griggs v. Duke, in legislation or case law. It could also be that French employment law has protections which would make a Griggs v. Duke unnecessary; France has some of the strongest employee protections in the developed world, and America some of the weakest. Comparing this or that aspect of French law to this or that aspect of US law is all well and good, but you have to bear in mind that these laws are holistically connected to very different structures. A 1-on-1 comparison probably won't show much.
Autocorrect is a bitch. I meant positive discrimination, i.e. going out of your way to hire people from protected groups. Griggs brought affirmative action into the private sector by making it potentially illegal to have any hiring standard that created a disparate impact. I say "potentially" because you could still prove your standards were necessary after being dragged to court to pay legal fees.
New York recently had to pay out insane amounts of money because they were demanding unnecessarily high reading and writing skills from public school teachers.
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