Disparate impact alone cannot make a law unconstitutional without discriminatory intent.

Evidence

As recently as 1996, the Supreme Court has held that in order for a law with a racially disparate impact to be unconstitutional, the law has to have a racially discriminatory purpose. Put another way, if a case for race-based tax relief went to the Supreme Court, you’d have to prove that tax policy was created with the explicit intent to make black taxpayers pay more. To say that Congress may have been aware that a particular tax provision would help white taxpayers more than black taxpayers is simply not enough to hold up under current precedent. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 548

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines the difference between ‘discriminatory purpose’ and mere ‘disparate impact’ under current Equal Protection precedent.
• XREF: This intent standard is the constitutional backbone of the entire chapter and of the overarching thesis: it explains why facially neutral provisions with racist effects survive — the mechanism driving all four named tax provisions.