ABSTRACT

This chapter began as an account of the constitutional underpinnings of the idea of social equity. Superficially, this might seem to be an easy task: a reference to the Declaration of Independence, a short trot through the antislavery movement and the Civil War culminating in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, a lament for the undermining of those amendments after the end of Reconstruction, pained outrage over Jim Crow, an expression of satisfaction that the country began in good faith to rectify its errors as a result of the civil rights movement, and a recapitulation of the past forty years of progress in legislation, constitutional law, and social practice, culminating in the election of President Barack Obama, who is the emblem of America’s capacity for change and redemption. That is the story the State Department likes to tell the world, and it moves smoothly into support for the idea that the Constitution of the United States has social equity-that is, a commitment to treating all American citizens as equally worthy regardless, as they say, of “race, color, or creed”—as a bedrock value from which there are now only temporary and unfortunate lapses deplored by all persons of goodwill and rectified promptly by the operation of enlightened public policy and a just and efficient legal system. Right?