Abstract
NE of the more conspicuous paradoxes of slavery's legacy in contemporary America is to have produced two diametrically opposed schools of thought about how best to achieve racial equality. One school, conventionally associated with the policy of affirmative action, holds that it is legitimate for government to make distinctions between persons in terms of their race in order to overcome the continued effects of past racial discrimination. Another school, conventionally associated with the ideal of the color-blind Constitution (articulated most famously by Justice John Marshall Harlan in his Plessy dissent), asserts that racial equality is above all a matter of formal equality before the There are, to be sure, many ways of complicating this dichotomy, and many arguments can be advanced both for and against the two positions. Boiled down to its essence, the debate over how to achieve racial equality is a debate between content and form, the realities of the social world versus the ideals of the rule of law.
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