Equal-rights law dates back barely fifty years against two centuries of exclusion

Evidence

It was not until 1964 that the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate against black Americans in schools and in the workplace, and it took another year for the Voting Rights Act to guarantee black Americans the right to vote. The right for men and women to marry regardless of race wasn’t the law of the land until the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia in 1967. The following year, Congress made it illegal to discriminate against black Americans in providing housing opportunities. The law told black Americans that we could go to college, apply for jobs, get married, and buy homes without being denied access solely because of our race. That’s a little more than fifty years to take advantage of the same rights that had been granted to white Americans for more than two centuries. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 53

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘fifty years versus two centuries’ framing is a useful framing hook for the article’s core argument about why neutral rules produce unequal results given vastly unequal starting dates.
• XREF: connects to: Overt and structural barriers excluded women from law until the late twentieth century — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663