chapter 14 Flashcards
(20 cards)
De jure equality
Equality before the law. It disallows legally mandated obstacles to equal treatment, such as laws that prevent people from voting, living where they want to, or taking advantage of all the laws of the federal, state and, and local government.
Unfair discrimination
Unequal treatment based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other distinctions.
De facto equality
Equality of results, which measures real world obstacles to equal treatment. For example; do people actually live where they want? Do they work under similar conditions?
Black codes
Laws restricting the civil rights of African Americans.
Suffrage
The right to vote.
State action
Action taken by state officials or sanctioned by the state law.
Jim Crow laws
Laws passed by southern states that separated the races in public places such as railroads, streetcars, schools, and cemeteries.
Peonage
A system in which employers advance wages and then require workers to remain in their jobs, in effect enslaving them, until the debt is satisfied.
Desegregation
The elimination of laws and practices that mandate racial separation.
Integration
Government efforts to valence the racial composition in schools and public places.
Boycott
Refusal to patronize any organization that practices policies perceived as politically economically, or ideologically unfair.
Protest march
March in which people walk down a Main Street carrying signs, singing freedom songs, and chanting slogans.
Sit - in
A protest technique in which protesters refuse to leave an area.
Freedom riders
Civil rights activists who traveled throughout the American south on buses to test compliance with supreme courts mandated to integrate bus terminals and public facilities accommodating interstate travelers.
Affirmative action
Programs that attempt to improve the chances of minority applications for jobs, housing, employment, and education by giving them a “boost” relative to white applicants with similar qualifications.
Quota programs
Programs that guarantee a certain percentage of admission, new hires, or promotions to member of minority groups.
Sexism
Prejudice against the female gender.
Test of reasonableness
Test in court cases of what reasonable people would agree to be constitutional because the law has a rational basis for its existence.
Strict scrutiny test
Test of the law that discriminates on the basis of a characteristic “immutable by birth” such as race or nationality: in such cases, the burden shifts from the plaintiff to the state, forcing the government to show the compelling reasons for the law.
Heightened scrutiny test
A middle-level standard that would force the state to prove more than just the reasonableness of a law, though not its compelling nature, in order to justify it.
