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ARE AMERICA'S CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS STILL RELEVANT?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2008

John D. Skrentny
John D. Skrentny*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
*
Professor John D. Skrentny, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0533. E-mail: jskrentny@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

The federal government created America's historic 1964 Civil Rights Act during a period of low immigration. The primary goal was to create equal opportunities for African Americans by ending Jim Crow discrimination in the South. Focusing on the issue of employment discrimination, and specifically employer preferences for immigrants, this article shows how the current period of high immigration from Latin America and Asia has created new challenges and dilemmas for Title VII, the employment discrimination title of the Civil Rights Act. Specifically, sociological evidence indicates that U.S. businesses are engaging in race-conscious employment focused on the perceived value of racial skills (special abilities of certain racial groups at particular jobs) and racial symbolism (organizational benefits from displaying certain races on the work force). Businesses hire Asians and Latinos, and especially immigrant Asians and Latinos, because of the perceived racial skills of these groups at low-status jobs that require strong work ethics and obedient attitudes. Corporate employers seeking skilled workers do not necessarily prefer immigrants. Instead, they seek minorities for the symbolic value of their diversity, for their general racial skills at bringing new ideas to the workplace, and for their racial marketing skills for growing non-White markets. I assess these developments from a legal perspective, showing that a combination of a lack of litigation and some key court decisions have prevented Title VII from regulating racial skills and racial symbolism and/or from offering protection for immigrants themselves.

Keywords

ImmigrationDiscriminationCivil RightsLawEmploymentRace
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 119 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2007

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Footnotes

1

This article was written with support from the Institute for Labor and Employment and the Guggenheim Foundation. The author would like to thank Hilda Chan, Paul Frymer, Gordon Hanson, Tomás Jiménez, Deborah Malamud, Ruth Milkman, Shehzad Nadeem, Stanley Skrentny, and Brent Valentine for helpful assistance and comments.

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