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The Equal Protection clause states that it will not “…. [D]eny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The clause is violated when someone is treated differently due to their race, ethnicity, or protected class.
Throughout history, the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause has been used to strike down state laws that promote inequality and discrimination. For instance, in Loving v. Virginia, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals held that a state law that prohibited interracial marriage did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because all races were being treated the same as their own race. After realizing the insidious discrimination, under the same clause the United States Supreme Court invalidated the state law on the basis of race discrimination.
Although the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is to protect United States citizens, the Court has varied opinions when deciding cases based on the color of one’s skin. In 1896, the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson notoriously established the “separate but equal “doctrine, holding that segregating United States citizens based solely on race was constitutional and not a violation of the Equal Protection clause. During the time of Plessy, race segregation was prevalent, and laws that discriminated against African Americans, known as Jim Crow Laws, were commonly enforced.
Homer Plessy, a man who was one-eighth black and seven-eighth white, appeared to the human eye to be white. Plessy bought a train ticket and attempted to board the white-only bus, where he was then arrested for violating the statute that prohibited racial commingling. Plessy brought the case to the Supreme Court where he argued that the Equal Protection Clause protected him from discrimination based on the color of his skin and that he was deprived of due process.” Plessy’s lawyer, Albion Tourgée, fought hard for Plessy and the notion of equality but was ultimately defeated by the court’s holding. The Court held that the racial segregation on the train did not deprive Mr. Plessy, nor any African American, of due process because Plessy’s race as a one-eighth black man did not “properly arise on the record.” The Court’s holding enabled white privilege to continue, allowing Jim Crow laws to discriminate and treat African Americans as subordinates to white persons.
Almost sixty years after the decision of Plessy, African American parents argued that segregation in public schools was a deprivation of the Equal Protection clause. The plaintiff’s argument was focused on the adverse result of racial segregation in the classroom, despite the equality in ‘tangible’ things inside the classroom. The Court held that it was a deprivation of Equal Protection to segregate children based solely on their race, identifying the detriment of segregating children. The Court found that separating white children from African American children in the classroom resulted in African American children feeling defeated and inferior, causing a lack of motivation in the classroom and negatively impacting a child’s grades and ability to learn.
Although “separate but equal”, the proposition held constitutional in Plessy was overturned in Brown, and the stigma of race and segregation continues to exist today. Race and wealth are intertwined. Unlike race which is a fundamental right triggering strict scrutiny, rational basis review is the test used to determine the legitimacy of a law regarding wealth. And although it has been extensively argued that a person’s wealth should be treated as a suspect group- requiring a heightened level of scrutiny, a person’s socioeconomic class is usually found to be constitutional under the lenient rational basis review. The burden in a rational basis review is on the plaintiff, not the government, and as long as a court decides there is any merit to the law imposed, a law discriminating against a person based on her wealth will be upheld.
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