Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality

Abstract

Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality Richard Thompson Ford. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Clothbound. 272 pages. ISBN 978-0-374-25035-5. $27.00In November 2011, the long- awaited fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary was published. Among the many new words and terms that interested readers could find was "anchor baby," defined as "[a] child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family." Within scant weeks, this definition was revised, at the behest of Mary Giovagnoli, director of the Immigration Policy Center, who called it "poisonous and derogatory" on a blog post that quickly metastasized. The editors issued an apology, formally designated the term "offensive," and rewrote the definition to emphasize the disparaging way that it is used by those on one side of the debate "over whether to change the Constitution to deny automatic American citizenship to children born in [the United States] to illegal immigrant parents."1 A small but important victory for the rights of immigrants was duly proclaimed.But was it a victory that provided meaningful aid to immigrants? Or was it, as some commentators fulminated, a case of political correctness gone awry?2 Could Giovagnoli's success in orchestrating a change in the original definition of "anchor baby" be, on the lexicographic level, an example of what Richard Thompson Ford had in mind when he wrote Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality?Ford's central thesis is nothing if not bold-sure to be disputed by those who have taken advantage of the necessary gains brought about by American civil- rights laws (CRLs) in the 1960s to wrest for themselves undeserved individual entitlements that, paradoxically, further entrench inequalities. CRLs, he explains, were once vital in combating the "outright discrimination and overt prejudice" that was prevalent in the United States some fifty years ago. However, because the "most serious social injustices" in the contemporary era "aren't caused by bias and bigotry" but rather by long- term structural factors, continued reliance both on the rhetoric of civil rights and the court system to enforce existing CRLs and/or expand their ambit often "distract[s] attention from ... real problems, emphasizing dramatic incidents that aren't good examples of ... larger injustices" (pp. 9-10). Engaging in social protests as a matter of "style" rather than "substance" and conceptualizing rights "as entitlements to be exploited to the maximum extent possible," opportunists such as "special- interest lobbying groups" and political activists "twist[ed] and pervert[ed] the legacy of civil rights" in order "to get an edge in competitive schools and job markets, demanding special privileges, a disproportionate share of public resources, and even cold hard cash as a matter of civil rights" (pp. 11, 14, 23-24). They treated rights as a "secular religion," combining "the legal culture of rights extremism" with popular- culture bromides such as "self- help, personal growth, and self- actualization" to create a toxic brew wherein the "conflation of self- obsession with personal virtue breeds the solipsism and self- righteousness that inspire wrongheaded claims of right" (pp. 19, 24). No longer was the focus on "tangible economic or political injury," but on vaguely defined notions of "self- esteem and dignity"-a legacy of the "strong psychotherapeutic strand in civil rights activism" that begot the narcissism of the Me Generation, members of which came to view "almost any personal belief or selfish desire as sufficiently profound to deserve civil rights protection" (pp. 18, 29).Ford examines a number of these selfish desires, focusing first on the issue of disability rights, a highly charged topic if there ever was one, as can be seen from the lively debate in early 2012 about tightening the definition of a mild form of autism called Asperger syndrome (or "pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified" [PDD- NOS]) in light of Department of Education data showing that "the number of 6- to 21-year olds with autism in public schools has quadrupled" in the past ten years. …