Racial Discrimination, Interpretation, and Legal Adjudication

Since the Civil Rights Act, state oversight has constrained racial discrimination in employment to some degree. Interpretational gaps among victims and perpetrators, loopholes in the law, and adjudication by judges, however, arguably allow such discrimination to persist. Building on prior work and drawing on rich qualitative detail from judicial decisions from two states, the authors analyze in this article (1) how employees versus employers discuss potentially discriminatory incidents and (2) the criteria judges draw from when making legal determinations about whether employer actions are, in fact, discrimination. Minority workers point to unequal treatment while their employers in such cases mostly highlight a meritocratic process or some problematic feature of the employee in question. Administrative judges, in trying to rectify otherwise contrasting narratives, mostly side with employers given several legal loopholes in discrimination law—i.e., loopholes that allow judges to infer employer fairness from compositional diversity or the fact that the employee in question was originally hired in the first place. Although racial/ethnic minority employees prevail periodically, this is relatively rare, usually requiring explicitly racist behavior by employers, a clean employee work history, and very strong comparative case evidence. The authors conclude by discussing these findings and their pertinence for racial inequality, legal justice, and sociology of work scholarship.