Chapter 6 Vocab Flashcards
affirmative action
Programs attempting to compensate for past discrimination by giving preference to minorities and women in areas like hiring and promotion.
alien
Any person who is not a U.S. citizen.
Brown v. Board of Education
A Supreme Court decision which overruled the doctrine of separate but equal by forbidding segregation in public education. The Court held that segregation produces a detrimental “feeling of inferiority” in African American children.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
A federal law banning discrimination in public accommodations, voting, and employment.
compensatory action
A position favored by a majority of Americans that supports helping disadvantaged people catch up, usually by giving them extra education, training, or services.
de facto segregation
A form of segregation which exists through housing patterns and informal social pressures, not through law.
de jure segregation
Segregation produced by law.
equality of opportunity
A goal opposed to that of affirmative action, holding that people should compete in the marketplace equally and be judged by their worth; not by color or sex.
equality of results
The goal favored by most civil rights and feminist organizations, who advocate affirmative action as a realistic necessity since the burdens of racism and sexism can be overcome only by taking race and sex into account in designing remedies. People cannot compete on an equal footing unless the government intervenes to bring everyone to a comparable starting position.
Fourteenth Amendment
A constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that forbids states from (1) denying the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, (2) depriving any person of due process of law, or (3) denying any person equal protection of the law.
Hyde amendment
A congressional restriction barring the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions except when the life of the mother is at stake.
Jim Crow
A slang expression for African Americans that was later applied to laws and practices that segregated African Americans from whites.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
An organization formed in 1909 to further the civil rights of African Americans. Its major emphasis has been the litigation of cases in courts.
nonviolent civil disobedience
A tactic employed in the early demonstrations of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s that involved peaceful violation of the law.
Plessy v. Ferguson
A Supreme Court decision that upheld the separate but equal doctrine, by which different races could be assigned to separate facilities so long as the facilities were of equal condition.
