期刊名称：Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
印刷版ISSN：0017-8039
电子版ISSN：1943-5061
出版年度：2008
卷号：43
期号：01
出版社：Harvard Law School
摘要：Modern constitutional law and scholarship rests on a conceptual mis-
take: thinking of African Americans as a minority. Scholars1 and courts2
routinely characterize African Americans as minorities who, in various ways
in the past or present, were discriminated against by a hostile or indifferent
majority.
3 Typical is Justice Harlan’s reassurance, in his dissent in Plessy v.
Ferguson, that “[s]ixty millions of whites are in no danger from the pres-
ence here of eight millions of blacks.”4 Similarly, the famous Footnote 4 of
Carolene Products explained that laws affecting “discrete and insular mi-
norities” excluded from “political processes” might be subject to heightened
judicial review.
5 But the premise recognized the difficulty: ordinarily, mi-
norities must expect to lose in the political process.
6
