About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

13 Buff. L. Rev. 450 (1963-1964)
Stereotype: Hard Core of Racism, The

handle is hein.journals/buflr13 and id is 468 raw text is: THE STEREOTYPE: HARD CORE OF RACISM Louis LusKY* T HE Great Debate of our time centers upon the question whether and how we can learn to live at peace with our neighbors at home and abroad. On the domestic side, the major segment of that Debate concerns justice to the Negro. Much work has been done to hammer out rules of law and institutional mechanisms adequate to fulfil the broad promise of the equal protection clause and to reconcile it with other basic values of our society, such as the preference for decentralized government and the preservation of individual freedom in the choice of personal associates and the use of property.' As advances are made, it is well to keep the ultimate goal constantly in mind. Otherwise it may be hard to tell whether an offered compromise is a highway or a dead end-since the acceptability of a compromise ordinarily depends on whether it involves dis- figurement of a basic principle. Forgetfulness of the strategic objective may even lead to tactical measures that regress from it. The strategic objective is perfection of a single community, pluralistic in culture but unified by mutual empathy,2 rather than development or preservation of two distinct communities co-existing uneasily at arm's length. What has prevented us from achieving it during the whole century following emancipation is the stereotype that has hindered most whites from seeing their Negro brothers as the individuals they are. The stereotype still holds us in thrall. Our strategic objective is to obliterate it-to work a change in the mode of looking at Negroes, analogous (in quality if not in degree) to the change that took place, between the 1928 defeat of Al Smith and the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, in the mode of looking at the Roman Catholic. Let us be clear about what we mean by stereotype. It is a conception of a group of people as possessing, each of them, certain characteristics that are believed to inhere in the group; a conception that is factually erroneous; and a conception that is impervious to rational refutation because it is rooted in the emotions rather than the intellect. The stereotype is more than a simple overgeneralization about human attributes and behavior. A belief that redheaded children are hot-tempered does not blind us to reality because, having no emotional stake in the validity of the proposition, we are not hampered by it in appraising truly the temperament * Professor of Law, Columbia University. A.B. 1935, University of Louisville; LL.B. 1937, Columbia University. 1. Valuable work in identifying this reconciliation problem, and suggesting an approach to it, has been done by my colleague Louis Henkin in his ground-breaking article, Shelley v. Kraemer: Notes for a Revised Opinion, 110 U. Pa. L. Rev. 473 (1962). Professor Henkin appears to conceive of equal protection and due process as competing principles. Perhaps it would be more useful to regard them as cooperating forces, both contributing to the perfection and preservation of an open society, which must be kept in balance for best achievement of that end. Cf. Lusky, Minority Rights and the Public Interest, 52 Yale L.J. 1 (1942). 2. See Lusky, Peace . . . the Presence of Justice, 17 The Humanist 195, 198 (1957).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most