(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Anti-Discrimination Laws are Being Used to Protect White People. That’s Really Stupid. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-08 One of the stupidest quotes that came out of SCOTUS’s most recent affirmative action rulings came from Justice Roberts. He states, “The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well.” Nope. Nuh uh. No it isn’t. The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause was to protect Black people from White people. The entire point was that White Supremacists would rather wage a Civil War than allow Black people to become anything other than their property. The entire point was that if federal legislation wasn’t passed, White people would continue to deny Black people their rights under the Constitution after the became free. The Equal Protection Clause wasn’t written because Black and White people were equally discriminating against each other. It was written because White people, White men specifically, had built the entire nation around the violent subjugation of people that weren’t White. It was White people that committed genocides against the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. It was White people that enslaved millions of Black people through the transatlantic slave system. And it was it was white people that systemically and violently disenfranchised, incarcerated, redlined, gentrified, de-educated and exploited generations of BIPOC peoples. White people. White people did that. They continue to do that. The Equal Protections Clause was written to confront systemic racism. Systemic racism in the United States is a product of White Supremacy. Sure, people can have interpersonal bigotries regardless of their race, but actual structural racism – that’s a White thing. But neither the Equal Protections Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 properly reflect that. We can change that. It’s far past time we passed an updated Civil Rights Act. There are a number of ways the Civil Rights Act needs to be updated in order to be used as a tool to dismantle White Supremacy. One of the most effective adjustments we can make is to rewrite the way protected classes are described. As they are currently written, these classes are articulated completely without context. And without context, the people minorities need protection from can capitalize off of it. Letting them is stupid. As currently written, the Civil Rights Act protects people from being discriminated against because of their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” This language doesn’t reflect that minority groups don’t just need protection for who they ARE, the need protection for who they AREN’T. We don’t just need protections because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. We need protection from White, Cristian, American-born men and the systems they have created to oppress us. A new Civil Rights Act could amend this fatal flaw in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and repurpose it to more fully serve every class or people protected under it. For example, other classes protected by the Civil Rights Act include those discriminated against because of disability, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religion. A radical court like the one we have in place now can apply an interpretation that asserts that folks with disabilities are oppressing the able bodied, women are stripping the rights of men, the LGBTQ community is demonizing straight people, and non-Christians are forcefully neutralizing the Christian population. They aren’t. All of those assertions are wildly stupid. And our laws need to reflect that. Instead of saying it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, we need to legislate that it is illegal to discriminate against someone because they aren’t White. Instead of legislating against gender-based discrimination, we need to rewrite our laws to say that people can’t be discriminated against because they aren’t men. Similarly, gender identification, sexual orientation, disability and religion need to be re-legislated to protect people that aren’t straight, aren’t cis-gendered, aren’t able bodied and aren’t Christian. Every protected class needs to be recognized for the discrimination they face because of the class they belong to (or have been assigned to) as well as the protection they need specifically from the dominant class that has structurally created their oppression in this nation. It's a simple linguistic adjustment, but the legal ramifications would be widespread and devastating to the far right, White supremacist movement. Without that protection, White Supremacists, run of the mill racists, and organized bigots will continue to weaponize the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protections Clause against minorities. And as stupid as their legal assertions are, SCOTUS will back them. And so it’s time to revisit the Civil Rights Act and make it stupid-proof. We need to place the context back in so the radical Court can’t re-write our laws and the history behind them itself. 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