Resource: Racial Classification and Ascriptive Injury

This Article describes a new model of the relationship between racial ascriptions on an individual level, private racial bias, social disadvantage, and state action, called the cognitive hierarchical model. It argues that racial hierarchy in the wider culture affects our individual cognitions, and vice versa. Status evaluations turn out to be built deep into our racial perceptions. Because the state exercises a continuing influence on our culture and the cognitions it generates, this Article defends new grounds for constitutional challenge to state complicity in racial hierarchy. To be ascribed a stigmatized racial identity is to be subject to continuing harm, which this Article calls ascriptive injury. The state, by participating in the continual creation and reinscription of stigmatized racial identities, contributes to such ascriptive injuries, which for that reason must be subject to a constitutional remedy.