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88 Calif. L. Rev. 77 (2000)
Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How Color Blindness Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification

handle is hein.journals/calr88 and id is 91 raw text is: Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How Color Blindness Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification Reva B. Siegelt I am quite pleased to have this opportunity to comment on Robert Post's provocative Lecture, Prejudicial Appearances.' Post's effort to dis- tinguish the dominant conception of antidiscrimination law from what he presents as a sociological account of the field intersects in striking ways with my own efforts to analyze status relations and their disestablishment from a sociohistorical vantage point. In this Response, I would like to identify some key points of similarity and difference in our accounts, with a view to furthering consideration of what we might learn from a socio- logical approach to the field. I have learned more than I can express from working with Robert Post over the years, yet I still find myself startled-sometimes with exaspera- tion, most often with delight-at the ways our intuitions about things of this world diverge and converge. In the long tradition of our long argu- ments, this Response begins by emphasizing an important difference in our approaches to the question explored in his Lecture, and winds up identify- ing a deep ground of methodological agreement between us. As I explore in the first Part of this Response, my own efforts to model antidiscrimination law from a dynamic, or sociohistorical, vantage point take as central to the field the problem of social stratification, a con- cept missing from Post's sociological account. In the remainder of this Response, I argue that one needs a concept of social stratification-of status inequality among groups arising out of the interaction of social Copyright 02000 California Law Review, Inc. Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School. This essay is written in loving memory of my father. I would especially like to thank Jack Balkin and Robert Post and the precious circle of friends who were generous enough to engage me this year about the questions that haunted the writing of this essay, and much more: Bruce Ackerman, Lisa Cardyn, Ariela Dubler, Owen Fiss, Bob Gordon, Ian Haney Lopez, Angela Harris, Dan Kahan, Lisa Orsaba, Carol Rose, Marge Shultz, and Kenji Yoshino. 1. Robert Post, Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law, 88 CALIF. L. REV. I (2000). 77

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