7.3 Civil Rights Abuses

Assessing Perceived Threats and Oppression of Minority Groups

Civil rights abuses happen when majority groups use their power to restrict, harm, or marginalize minority groups. Understanding how and why these abuses occur is central to political science, because it reveals the gap between a government's stated ideals and the lived experiences of its people.

Assessment of Minority Group Threats

Majority groups often perceive minority groups as threats to their power, status, or way of life. These perceived threats fall into three broad categories:

• Economic threats: competition for jobs, housing (e.g., tensions around gentrification), or social services (e.g., debates over welfare benefits)
• Cultural threats: anxiety over changing demographics, languages, or social norms (e.g., resistance to affirmative action in education)
• Political threats: fear that minority groups will gain voting power and shift policy priorities

These perceptions don't have to be accurate to be powerful. Stereotyping and prejudice amplify them by portraying minority groups in negative terms, such as labeling immigrants as "untrustworthy" or associating racial minorities with criminality. Once those stereotypes take hold, they fuel real-world discrimination in hiring practices, housing access, and everyday social interactions, as well as outright hostility like hate speech.

Methods of Minority Oppression

Oppression of minority groups takes many forms, ranging from institutional discrimination to outright violence.

Systemic discrimination operates through the everyday structures of society:

1. Employment: discriminatory hiring practices (e.g., studies showing resume screening bias based on names) and unequal pay (e.g., the gender wage gap)
2. Housing: redlining (banks denying loans in minority neighborhoods) and restrictive covenants (contract clauses prohibiting property sales to certain racial groups)
3. Education: segregated schools and unequal funding driven by property tax disparities between wealthy and poor districts

Voter suppression and disenfranchisement aim to limit minority political participation. Historical tactics included literacy tests and poll taxes during the Jim Crow era (poll taxes were banned by the 24th Amendment in 1964). Contemporary tactics include strict voter ID laws and felony disenfranchisement. Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of district boundaries, can dilute minority voting power by either dispersing minority voters across many districts or packing them into a single one.

Violence and intimidation target minority groups directly. This includes hate crimes (e.g., cross burnings by the KKK), police brutality, and mob violence (e.g., lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South).

In extreme cases, oppression escalates to:

• Massacres: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
• Ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar
• Genocide: the Holocaust, in which the Nazi regime systematically murdered six million Jews

Cultural suppression and forced assimilation aim to erase minority identities. Native American boarding schools in the U.S. banned Indigenous languages and cultural practices. Some countries have restricted religious expression, such as headscarf bans in public institutions. Forced assimilation policies push minority groups to abandon their own culture and adopt majority norms.

Power Dynamics and Civil Rights Abuses

Power Dynamics in Government Responsiveness

Majority groups tend to hold disproportionate political power and representation. This imbalance shapes which concerns the government prioritizes and which it ignores.

• Minority groups often struggle to get their issues on the political agenda due to underrepresentation in legislatures and lack of access to political networks
• Barriers to political influence include voter suppression, limited financial resources for campaign funding, and exclusion from established power structures
• Governments may respond to majority demands even when those demands infringe on minority rights, because doing so maintains broader political support (e.g., state-level bans on same-sex marriage before Obergefell v. Hodges)
• Majority groups can also pressure governments to resist reforms, such as opposing police accountability measures or blocking immigration policy changes

The result is a cycle: political underrepresentation makes it harder for minority groups to change the policies that keep them underrepresented.

Civil Rights Abuses Across Contexts

Historical examples in the United States:

1. Slavery and the denial of basic rights to African Americans, reinforced by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which ruled that Black people were not citizens
2. Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and its "separate but equal" doctrine
3. Japanese American internment during World War II, in which roughly 120,000 people were forcibly relocated to camps, upheld in Korematsu v. United States (1944)

Contemporary examples in the United States:

1. Racial profiling and police brutality, brought to national attention by cases like the killing of George Floyd in 2020
2. Discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in employment, housing, and public accommodations (e.g., debates over transgender bathroom access and religious exemption cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)
3. Islamophobia and targeting of Muslim Americans after 9/11, including the 2017 travel ban restricting entry from several Muslim-majority countries

Global examples:

1. Apartheid in South Africa: a system of institutionalized racial segregation that oppressed the Black majority until its dismantling in the early 1990s
2. Rohingya persecution in Myanmar: a campaign of ethnic cleansing involving mass killings and forced displacement
3. Discrimination against Roma people in Europe: including forced sterilization programs and widespread social exclusion
4. Oppression of Uyghur Muslims in China: involving mass internment camps and surveillance

Civil Rights, Liberties, and Human Rights

These three terms are related but distinct, and keeping them straight matters for this course:

• Civil rights protect individuals from discrimination and ensure equal treatment under the law (e.g., the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment)
• Civil liberties are fundamental freedoms that limit government power over individuals, such as freedom of speech and religion (protected by the Bill of Rights)
• Human rights are universal rights considered inherent to all people regardless of nationality or legal status, as outlined in documents like the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

A few additional concepts tie these ideas together:

• Intersectionality examines how multiple forms of discrimination (race, gender, class, etc.) overlap and compound oppression. A Black woman, for example, may face discrimination that is distinct from what a Black man or a white woman experiences.
• Systemic racism refers to racial bias embedded in societal institutions and structures, producing unequal outcomes even without individual acts of prejudice.
• Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent protest used to challenge unjust laws, such as the lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement.