The other day I saw a picture of a group of students in a Jewish day school. I got me thinking – people are allowed to make Jewish schools, Christian schools, Islamic schools. Presumably the reasoning is that the schools wants to teach religion along with normal academic subjects.
There are also other race based institutions that have little to do with education. This one, for instance. I would presume the reasoning is that people find comfort in being with people like themselves, in this case, Jewish people may come here to be with other Jews.
If a someone outside of the ethnic group wanted to attend an ethnic organization and were turned away, would that be racial discrimination?
If someone wanted to make a community center for Catholics, Sunni Muslims, Blacks, and Latinos, would they be within their rights (legally) or would that be racial discrimination?
If someone wanted to create a community center for everyone but a specific group (for the purposes of discussion, let’s say Japanese). Would it be within their rights to do this?
So basically, it boils down to the question: Is a race based organization racial discrimination or is it protected by the First Amendment?
OP Disclaimer: I don’t want this to turn into a mess, like the other thread a while back did (it was about housing rights, and everyone accused the guy of being a neo-nazi racist when he was just thought he was protesting the government’s interference in the right of communities to decide who lives with them). Let’s try not to make this about whether or not racial discrimination is a good thing, but if race based organizations are racial discrimination or protected by the right to peaceably assemble.
For the record, the Catholic schools around here will aceept non-Catholic students, as long as they agree to follow the rules, which include taking religion classes.
The right to free assembly means that the government cannot prevent people from assembling, although obviously there are limits to that. People can decide not to assemble with whoever they want.
Zev, you remind me. When I went to library school and took a class in ethnic librarianship, one professor who had emigrated from the Soviet Union kept referring to Muslims as an “ethnic group” no matter how many times I gently reminded him that Islam transcends ethnicity and includes a huge number of different ethnic groups. He was otherwise smart and I think he was genuinely free of all bigotry. It’s just that he’d made his academic reputation as a scholar of ethnicity, and when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
How old was he when he left the USSR? Soviet Jews had ‘Jew’ under the race entry on all official cards and forms. It’s not a stretch to assume that Muslims were treated the same way. It could be that he can’t get rid of the classifications he lived with for decades.
As Martha Burke (that was her, right?) found out when Hootie took a hardline stance at Augusta. Not even the free market could overcome their right to admit whom they chose.
I’m still a bit iffy on the whole “discrimination in private clubs” thing. If I understand correctly, a private club can be forced to admit (certain) minority members against their members’ wishes, right? And is this generally regarded as a good thing?
In a limited number of cases, various authorities, (courts, states, or municipalities), have determined that a particular variety of men’s club was the specific location where movers and shakers set up large financial deals in an informal atmosphere of friendship. The deals were not considered unethical, but the manner of limiting membership by sex or race was deemed to have been a de facto way of prohibiting access to those deals to one or another protected group. (Effectively a mixing of restraint of trade with unlawful discrimination.) In those individual cases in select locations, either the courts or the governing bodies have ordered those clubs either to open their memberships or face sanctions against their charters.
The cases and petitions to legislature or council may or may not have had merit, but there has been no general prohibition against closed memberships for private organizations across the country.
As Zev noted, either through irony or typo, Judaism is a religion, not a race, so there may be a misunderstanding on the part of the OP regarding which groups are “allowed” to associate. Since we certainly allow the formation of Irish ethnic groups, Polish Ethnic groups, Italian ethnic groups, German ethnic groups, etc., I see no reason why we would forbid “Jewish” ethnic groups. (I put Jewish in quotation marks because for all practical purposes, a Jewish ethnic group in the U.S, (particularly in NYC), would be an Ashkenazi ethnic group, while other Jewish ethnic groups, (Sephardic, Mizrahi, etc.) would rarely find enough members to actually form a club in these later years in the U.S., even though the Shephardic Jews vastly outnumbered the Ashkenazim in the U.S. prior to around 1890.)
Tn New York, the basis for the rules prohibiting discrimination in clubs was that the clubs in question were deemed to be “public accommodation”, meaning they acted more like public restaurants and bars, rather than just purely as private clubs. New York Executive Law sec. 292(9) provides the following definition (bold and italics emphasis added):
In short, in New York, a private club may discriminate so long as it does not allow its dues or food/beverage charges to be paid directly or indirectly by non-members for business purposes. In other words, businesses cannot subsidize the membership fees or pay for corporate events.