News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
A Vanderbilt Professor said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 continues to protect Americans against new discriminatory issues.
Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics Joni Hersch spoke during Tennessee Tech’s 20th Annual Constitution Day Event Tuesday night. Hersch said the act is so important because it specifies how the freedoms laid out in Constitution are to be administered and legally provided.
“For instance: AI,” Hersch said. “How do you deal with AI when these algorithms are themselves potentially built in discriminatory? The Civil Rights Act allows the mechanism for identifying how to make sure AI doesn’t treat workers in a discriminatory fashion.”
Hersch said it is important to note that the Civil Rights Act does not conflict with affirmative action. Hersch said it is a vital discussion to have because affirmative action provides a number of advantages in educational and professional environments that spread to everyone in a given organization, not just those directly benefiting from it.
“It has a business purpose,” Hersch said. “Business leaders are uniformly in support of affirmative action and wrote many briefs to the Supreme Court in argument of support for affirmative action and now they’re afraid to do anything for fear of being sued. So we have business necessity, we have legal necessity, and we have the non-conflict anti-discrimination law that’s protective enough to prevent anybody from being discriminated against.”
Hersch said she hopes students who attended the event gain a better of understanding of just how expansive the act is and how it could apply to them personally.
“All you have to do is turn forty and it starts protecting you,” Hersch said. “Or let’s say you get a disability. Finally you’re protected. You can’t simply be fired because of that disability. Or heaven forbid you become pregnant and that becomes the grounds for not accommodating a water bottle at work, you are now protected against that. So it’s pretty much, there isn’t anybody that doesn’t have the benefit of nondiscriminatory workplaces.”
Hersch said that in addition to the new and evolving protections the act still provides a defense from forms of discrimination with a long history like sexual harassment.
“That’s still one of the most common complaints of unlawful discrimination that is made in to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Hersch said. “And but for the Civil Rights Act sexual harassment wouldn’t even be illegal. It wasn’t illegal. It was practiced widely until the Supreme Court deemed it actually a violation of the Civil Rights Act in 1986. It’s not history.”
Hersch said the Civil Rights Act is the most important legislation since the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and may remain the most important legislation for the foreseeable future. This year marks the 60th anniversary of its passing.
