Towards a Conception of Systemic Discrimination
What is involved in seeing discrimination as systemic and structural, and how could such an approach help us identify injustices, or aspects of injustices, that might otherwise be invisible? We lack a robust conception of systemic discrimination, both within philosophy of law and within our legal institutions. This lack is partly explained by the fact that most countries’ domestic discrimination laws target individual acts of discrimination and individual perpetrators. Although claimants can certainly bring evidence of how policies across different contexts intersect to reinforce disadvantage, the ultimate goal of domestic discrimination laws is not to explore these intersections but simply to figure out whether a particular discriminator needs to change a particular policy. This focus on individual discriminators in isolated contexts might lead one to assume that “systemic discrimination” just means “pervasive discrimination” and that it involves a large number of similar, individually cognizable incidents of discrimination, each of which can be understood as wrongful when taken on its own. If that were right, then there would really be no point in trying to develop …
