As Jonathan mentioned in his post, a theme Professor Bobo touched on in class this week was the difficulty of proving racial discrimination as an outcome of a process, or at least, the difficulty of receiving reparations or redress for discrimination without also being able to prove intent. I was really fascinated by this idea and how it came to be–when Professor Bobo mentioned it, it sounded exactly like what was legally valid in this country–but also sounded so  wrong. How did this come to be the standard for proving discrimination in our country? It just so happened that my constitutional law class began to look at cases related to race this past week, and so I was actually able to get a better picture of the situation. A 1976 case on federal hiring procedures, Washington v. Davis, led to the court setting a precedent that said that laws resulting in disparate impact for minorities do not meet with strict scrutiny from the court (which is to say that they are largely permissible) unless discriminatory intent can also be proved. From reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I learned that this standard has set us down a path of ignoring and/or legally validating policies and processes that disproportionately affect and hurt African-Americans and other minority community, simply because there is no proof of intent. Alexander specifically discusses this in the context of criminal justice, explaining how and why stop and frisk policies (Terry v. Ohio), disparate sentencing (McCleskey v. Kemp), and biased jury selection (a number of different cases, including one in front of the Court last week) have been legalized by the Supreme Court. This is yet another example of structural racial inequity in the United States, and one that is not often talked about. In school you learn about a number of different Supreme Court cases–the ones that guarantee rights, not take them away. Lack of public awareness about these policies is harmful, perpetuating negative and inaccurate stereotypes and reducing public will for policy change.