While this thread is long, I think it is very helpful to consider the distinction between the "victim perspective" and the "perpetrator perspective" in anti-discrimination law.
From Alan Freeman's, "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law": 1/
From Alan Freeman's, "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law": 1/
2/ The concept of "racial discrimination" may be approached from the perspective of either its victim or its perpetrator. From the victim's perspective, racial discrimination describes those conditions of actual social existence as a member of a perpetual underclass.
3/ This perspective includes both the objective conditions of life-lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing and the consciousness associated with those objective conditions-lack of choice and lack of human individuality in being forever perceived as a member of a group
4/ rather than as an individual. The perpetrator perspective sees racial discrimination not as conditions, but as actions, or series of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator. The focus is more on what particular perpetrators have done or are doing to some victims
5/ than it is on the overall life situation of the victim class. The victim* [see note at end], or "condition," conception of racial discrimination suggests that the problem will not be solved until the conditions associated with it have been eliminated.
6/ To remedy the condition of racial discrimination would demand affirmative efforts to change the condition. The remedial dimension of the perpetrator perspective, however, is negative. The task is merely to neutralize the inappropriate conduct of the perpetrator.
7/ In its core concept of the "violation," antidiscrimination law is hopelessly embedded in the perpetrator perspective. Its central tenet, the "antidiscrimination principle," is the prohibition of race dependent decisions that disadvantage members of minority groups," and its
8/ principal task has been to select from the maze of human behaviors those particular practices that violate the principle, outlaw the identified practices, and neutralize their specific effects. Antidiscrimination law has thus been ultimately indifferent to the condition of
9/ the victim; its demands are satisfied if it can be said that the "violation" has been remedied. The perpetrator perspective presupposes a world composed of atomistic individuals whose actions are outside of and apart from the social fabric and without historical continuity.
10/ From this perspective, the law views racial discrimination not as a social phenomenon, but merely as the misguided conduct of particular actors. It is a world where, but for the conduct of these misguided ones, the system of equality of opportunity would work to provide a
11/ distribution of the good things in life without racial disparities and where deprivations that did correlate with race would be "deserved" by those deprived on grounds of insufficient "merit." It is a world where such things as "vested rights," "objective selection systems,"
12/ and "adventitious decisions" (all of which serve to prevent victims from experiencing any change in conditions) are matters of fate, having nothing to do with the problem of racial discrimination.
13/ *[In the footnote, he defines “victim”:]
In the context of race, "victim" means a current member of the group that was historically victimized by actual perpetrators or a class of perpetrators. Victims are people who continue to experience life as a member of that group and
In the context of race, "victim" means a current member of the group that was historically victimized by actual perpetrators or a class of perpetrators. Victims are people who continue to experience life as a member of that group and
14/ continue to experience conditions that are actually or ostensibly tied to the historical experience of actual oppression or victimization, whether or not individual perpetrators, or their specific successors in interest, can be identified now. The victim perspective is
15/15 intended to describe the expectations of an actual human being who is a current member of the historical victim class-expectations created by an official change of moral stance toward members of the victim group. Those expectations, I suggest, include changes in conditions.
