The Trump administration is now seeking to undo civil protection rights for minorities as outlined by The Civil Rights Act, which will most likely affect LGBTQ people, women, and people with disabilities.
Specifically, the change is under Title VI which prohibits discrimination of federal funding based on race or nationality. The funding includes social programs like education, social security, and housing programs.
The Justice Dept. does not seek to completely repeal Title VI but instead change it so they only prosecute international discrimination and not “disparate impacts.” Intentional discrimination is citing someone’s race, color, or nationality as reasons to not offer them service or job. Disparate discrimination is when an employer or other service does not explicitly discriminate, but instead, takes action that indirectly gives minorities unequal opportunity, treatment, or service.
Civil Rights organizations claim that the disparate impact rule is important for preventing inequality because it allows them to examine patterns of discriminatory behavior overall and not individual instances of blatant discrimination. Repeal of the disparate impact rule means it would be extremely hard to prove discriminatory intention making it nearly impossible to seek civil protection for minorities in instances of most discriminatory policies.
Most cases of discrimination use the disparate impact rule to prosecute discrimination because most often organizations do not officially report their discrimination, but instead, take covert action to do so.
New York Times writer, Katie Benner, gives an example of the disparate impact rule in action: “the Jim Crow-era literacy tests that some states created as a condition to vote. The tests did not ask about race and so seemed neutral on their face. But they disproportionately prevented Black people from voting because they had long been forced out of schools and could not read.” Without the disparate impact rule, the use of literacy tests as a condition to vote would be entirely legal since it does not necessarily ask about the voter’s race.
Seth Galanter, the senior director of the National Center for Youth Law says that, “Deleting this regulation not only denies the government an important enforcement tool for detecting and addressing racial discrimination, but it will draw into question longstanding requirements that organizations that take federal funds from the department provide meaningful access to their programs to people who do not speak or read English.” If the Justice Department were to succeed, it would be the first change to Title VI since 1973.
