This isn't an opinion piece, just informational. Nothing to get excited about!
Often you here the term "protected class" misused, even by people who should know better. You might hear a business owner shy away from disciplining a member of a racial minority because he (or she) is "in a protected class", as if minorities had rights and protections that the majority didn't have. You also hear this "protected class" language applied to women as well as religious minorities.
In United States Federal anti-discrimination law, a protected class is a characteristic of a person which cannot be used as a basis for discrimination. In other words, "class" does not refer to a group of people at all. An example of a characteristic might be "hair color". Every person has hair color (at least those who have hair!). If hair color was a protected class, it would be illegal to discriminate based on the color of someone's hair.
One real example of a protected class is "race". Everyone has the characteristic of belonging to a certain race (setting aside for legal purposes the non-scientific basis and of race and it's perpetuation as a social contruct). Discrimination therefore is illegal if it is based on a person's race; not that people of certain race have special protections that members of other races do not have. The same goes for the other protected classes, some of which are: color, religion, national origin, age (over 40), gender, pregnancy, and citizenship status.
Thank you for such a clear and well-crafted definition of the often misused term, "protected class." I think one reason for the confusion is because other usages of the word class actually refer to groups of people, such as middle class or working class. It may have been better if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 referred to "protected classifications" to make it clearer.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the popular misunderstanding of this term because the confusion undermines the law when many mistakenly think that it gives special rights to certain groups.
I actually saw a news report recently in which someone was caught tagging homes in a small town with graffiti that said "Kill Jews", and the chief of police commented that this was not a hate crime because "nobody in a protected class lived in the homes." In other words, no Jews in the community should feel threatened or disturbed by this!