What Are Civil Rights and How Do We Identify Them?
What Are Civil Rights and How Do We Identify Them?
Lumen Learning and OpenStax
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Define the concept of civil rights
- Describe the standards that courts use when deciding whether a discriminatory law or regulation is unconstitutional
- Identify three core questions for recognizing a civil rights problem
The belief that people should be treated equally under the law is one of the cornerstones of political thought in the United States. Yet not all citizens have been treated equally throughout the nation’s history, and some are treated differently even today. For example, until 1920, nearly all women in the United States lacked the right to vote. Black men received the right to vote in 1870, but as late as 1940, only 3 percent of African American adults living in the South were registered to vote, due largely to laws designed to keep them from the polls.[1] Americans were not allowed to enter into legal marriage with a member of the same sex in many U.S. states until 2015. Some types of unequal treatment are considered acceptable in some contexts, while others are clearly not. No one would consider it acceptable to allow a ten-year-old to vote, because a child lacks the ability to understand important political issues, but all reasonable people would agree that it is wrong to mandate racial segregation or to deny someone the right to vote on the basis of race. It is important to understand which types of inequality are unacceptable and why.
DEFINING CIVIL RIGHTS
Essentially, civil rights are guarantees by the government that it will treat people equally—particularly people belonging to groups that have historically been denied the same rights and opportunities as others. The groups denied the same rights and treatment as others are usually denied on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Race can be defined as classification of a group of people reflecting various skin color and other physical characteristics developed for political, social, and economic exclusion. Race is not a precise physiological or biological construction but is rather a social construction. Ethnicity is another social construction that classifies groups of people based on nationality, nation of origin, or culture. Gender is a third social classification based on sex. More recently, the attitudes and governmental actions about how groups of people should interact and the roles they should assume in a society that favors some groups of citizens over others based on social classifications of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identification and orientation have expanded to include groups who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other identities. The unfair treatment of various groups have included efforts to physically segregate a so-called dominant from so-called subordinate groups by law or other governmental actions called de jure segregation, as well such physic