Racial Discrimination in Employment:
The legal framework of protection against employment discrimination is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which as amended provides protection against race, color, national origin, sex, religion, or age [Civil Rights Division 1]. Protection against discrimination based on disabilities is provided by separate legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In recent years, media attention with respect to the employment discrimination issue has tended to focus more on gender, age, disabilities, and so on, rather than on race. Several factors may contribute to this shift of emphasis. One is that these other forms of discrimination may affect a larger total number of people.
Half the population (or slightly more) is female, and everyone may some day find himself or herself a victim of age discrimination in employment. Discrimination on account of disabilities affects fewer people directly, but individuals with disabilities are found in every population subgroup. Thus everyone may have a friend or family member who might be subjected to employment discrimination due to a disability.
In contrast, residential and social separation of races is still very considerable. Middle class whites, who are the primary demographic toward which the news media are oriented, may have few personal contacts with blacks or other minorities, whose experience thus remains abstract to most news consumers. Indeed, the news consuming middle class has limited real contact with the working poor of any race, who are most likely to suffer discrimination on any grounds, and have the fewest resources with which to fight back.
Moreover, race remains an uncomfortable subject for majority white America. A great many people would prefer to assume that the race issue has essentially been solved. They can point to the obvious success of celebrities, from Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to Oprah Winfrey and ...