Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then use the BACK key in your browser to return to the page you were on.

Many of the criticisms made here can be found in the Words That Wound collection.

In the introduction, the authors write that

The first amendment arms conscious and unconscious racists -Nazis and liberals alike - with a constitutional right to be racist. Racism is just another idea deserving of constitutional protection like all ideas. The first amendment is employed to trump or nullify the only substantive meaning of the equal protection clause, that the Constitution mandates the disestablishment of the ideology of racism.

In a discussion of the public/private distinction, Charles Lawrence III writes

By restricting the application of the fourteenth amendment to discrimination implicating the government, the state action rule immunizes private discriminators from constitutional scrutiny. In doing so, it leaves untouched the largest part of the vast system of segregation in the United States. . . .[C]ountervailing values of privacy, freedom of association, and free speech all have been used to justify the rule's exculpation of private racism.
Reference: See Words That Wound, p. 15, 63