Justice Ginsburg: America Has A ‘Real Racial Problem’

[cal04]

The Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in combating racial discrimination, according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “What’s amazing,” she added, “is how things have changed.”

Ginsburg, who was one of America’s top civil rights attorneys before President Carter appointed her to the federal bench in 1980, spoke at length with the National Law Journal‘s Marcia Coyle in an interview that was published Friday. In that interview, she lays out just how much the Court’s outlook on race has changed since she was arguing women’s equality cases before it in the 1970s.

(snip)
Justice Ginsburg, for her part, warned that tossing out a key prong of the Voting Rights Act “when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

In what may become the most controversial part of her interview with Coyle, Ginsburg also suggests that public acceptance of gay Americans is eclipsing our ability to relate to each other across racial lines. “Once (gay) people began to say who they were,” Ginsburg noted, “you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired.” By contrast, according to Ginsburg, "that understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/22/3474542/justice-ginsburg-america-has-a-real-racial-problem/

[hifiguy]

1. May this wise woman have many years of good health,

We need Justice Ginsburg.

[Demit]

2. I wish the author had explained why he thought that was controversial.

Also, that's a curious characterization of her remarks: that acceptance of gays is "eclipsing" our ability to relate across racial lines. Goldberg is contrasting the two, not positioning them in some kind of competition. She's also quite plain in saying that the contrast between them is based in UNDERSTANDING. Being able to UNDERSTAND people comes from living in close proximity, being day-to-day familiar with people. That's where acceptance comes from.