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My claim is that we cannot do justice to these groups unless we change our very patterns of cultural expression and unconscious thinking. At the least, we must become aware of these patterns, so that we can prevent them from influencing our behavior and avoid passing them on to our children. And this project of cultural transformation is one in which the state is appropriately enlisted where it can be helpful. . . .

What I shall call "the antidiscrimination project" seeks to reconstruct social reality to eliminate or marginalize the shared meanings, practices, and institutions that unjustifiably single out certain groups of citizens for stigma and disadvantage. . . .

Stigmatized social status and the concomitant withholding of respect are in a sense the central evil the project seeks to remedy, since it is the source of the poison that contaminates, and renders unfair the outcomes of, public and private decision making. Stigma and insult are familiar parts of the daily experience of many in our society who are, for example, black, female, or gay. (It is compounded for those who belong to more than one of these categories.) The message of their inferiority is ubiquitous and constant, often received from people who do not even realize they are communicating it. The other injuries that concern the antidiscrimination project are bound up with this one. It is because some classes of people are stigmatized and regarded as inferior that government decision making fails to give due regard to their interests; the disproportionate poverty of women and blacks signifies their stigmatized social status.