How the Redefinition of Discrimination and Racism Changed How We Understand Racism, Fairness, and Justice

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

This is the table of contents for a series of nine posts I’ll release over the next 9 days (first is today, October 24, 2025) on how making disparities indicative of discrimination changed how we think about justice, equality, racism, and right and wrong.

The question this series examines is not whether disparate impact doctrine is correct in some broader sense. It’s whether a transformation this fundamental—one that redefined discrimination itself and came to govern how major institutions operate—should have happened through court decisions, agency interpretations, and voluntary institutional adoption rather than through explicit democratic deliberation about what we wanted.

I am not saying that the idea that disparities equal discrimination originated with a single legal case. On the contrary, it had been discussed and developed for years prior in academic and activist circles. I am saying that this case made disparate outcomes without intent to discriminate the legal equivalent—a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—of intentional discrimination. And that paved the way for a transformation of the moral framework we use to understand racism, identity, fairness, justice, and inequality.

The following posts are meant to be read in order but, hey, you do you.

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Part 1: The 1971 Supreme Court Decision That Redefined Discrimination

Part 2: The Legal Foundation: What the Court Actually Said

Part 3: The Legal Expansion—How Disparate Impact Spread Beyond Employment

Part 4: Academic Validation: How Research Explained the Mechanisms

Part 5: Institutional Adoption: How Organizations Built the Apparatus

Part 6: Political Mainstreaming: An Unchallengeable Framework

Part 7: Why This Breaks Democracy

Part 8: Why Current Solutions Can’t Work

Part 9: What Trump’s Popularity Reveals

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Full disclosure:

1. I put this series together with the help of Claude.ai. I fed it this paper, which I wrote (and will come out in the Independent Law Journal), and asked it to help break the concepts into a Substack-friendly series. I then went through and edited—and edited and edited and edited—the pieces and, well, here we are. Anyone looking for a more thorough and academic treatment should refer to the full paper.

2. This series is lightly cited. If you’re looking for more depth, I refer you to the SSRN paper.