Title VII and the Triumph of Individualism in American Law

Introduction: American Individualism and the Civil Rights Movement

"American individualism" is a phrase that is often bandied about in the popular media, yet it is seldom given a coherent historical definition. Rampant individualism is often seen as a societal negative endemic to America, where finding oneself is viewed as a form of excluding oneself from a larger responsibility to community and nation. Without a doubt, however, one of the most significant movements in American history — characterized precisely by a sense of social responsibility to a people, a community, and to an American ideal of freedom — was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King's final address proclaimed that although he might "get there" with his people, to the "mountaintop of equality," he would find comfort knowing that his people would eventually achieve their desired role in the American Dream.

One might contend, however, that paradoxically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — although it arose from this historical movement and coalesced into a sense of collective responsibility — contained within its fabric a greater sense of individualism than any previously existing legislation. On its surface, it was a piece of legislation primarily designed to protect the rights of individual African Americans from the proponents of "states' rights" in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was subsequently amended in 1991, but its overall legally protective structure has remained unchanged. The ways it has been interpreted and used since its passage, however, both practically and philosophically, have undergone seismic shifts. These shifts highlight the conflicted status of what constitutes an individual and individualism within American culture, and within the American legal framework of states' rights and individual rights.

Title VII: Defining Individuals, Employers, and Exceptions

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. This aspect of the Act defines itself as a bill protecting the rights of the individual, specifically protecting employee rights — implicitly at the expense of employer rights, though this is not explicitly stated. The Act states that the term "employee" means an individual employed by an employer. An "employer" is defined as a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year. Notably, an "employer" can be either an individual or a collective, while an "employee" can only be an individual under the Act's provisions.

Another curious feature of the Act's definitions concerns the exceptions made regarding the term "employee." The Act states that the term shall not include any person elected to public office in any state or political subdivision thereof by qualified voters, nor any person chosen by such an officer to serve on that officer's personal staff, nor an appointee at the policymaking level or an immediate adviser with respect to the exercise of constitutional or legal powers of the office. This exemption, however, does not include employees subject to the civil service laws of a state government, governmental agency, or political subdivision.

This means that members of Congress, employers of the state, or employers of any political subdivision of the state are free to discriminate based upon their own political leanings. Furthermore, the definition of "employer" specifically excludes the government of the United States as well as any Indian tribe within the American nation (2000e, section 707b).

In other words, an Indian tribe may discriminate based upon race, conferring certain rights to an individual simply because he or she is an Indian. The federal government may refuse to employ a member of another nation due to that individual's ethnic origin. For instance, under the American Constitution, no foreign-born national — even a naturalized citizen — can serve as president of the United States. Thus, even within the apparently individualistic framework of this piece of civil rights legislation, which was designed to protect individuals regardless of race, gender, or ethnic origin, the claim that the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of the individual over the will of the state is complicated by assertions of state control. At the very least, it is tempered by the federal government's own existence as a "state," by the right of individuals to elect their representatives, by the right of Indian sovereignty, and by certain notions of "American" identity that moderate complete faith in individual rights.

The Paradox of Collective Action and Individual Rights

Upon further analysis, one might counter that the very notion of protecting an individual's rights under the framework of their membership in a group reveals the paradoxical nature of so-called American individualism. The Civil Rights Act was achieved only through collective and communal political action, and it reflected a sense of group-based discrimination. The actions of the Civil Rights Movement took the form largely of collective boycotts — enacting a collective economic toll upon discriminatory communities — rather than isolated individual protests. Although borders between states were rendered less significant, collective identity was strongly emphasized. Yet the form of collective identity that emerged suggested that a white college student from the North who participated in a sit-in at a discriminatory lunch counter in the South had more in common, in terms of legal outlook, with oppressed African Americans in the region than with the white individuals of that state who refused to serve African Americans as they would white consumers. Individualism was thus not the sole ideological currency of the movement; rather, individualism defined by state and regional identification was disturbed and shifted.

Furthermore, the Act was motivated by the tendency of many Americans — individually and collectively — to make generalizations and to engage in discriminatory practices against other individuals on the basis of gender, racial, and ethnic origins. The federal government was therefore compelled to step in and collectively guard against state-codified prejudices of individual and collective employers in particular regions of the country. Additionally, in enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, certain exceptions had to be provided for — most notably, allowing that individuals who were members of religious organizations must be permitted to discriminate based upon organizational membership.

Conclusion: The Shifting Definition of the Individual in American Law

American individualism did triumph with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in one meaningful sense: the Confederate conception of states' rights versus individual rights was finally resolved against state oppression in a coherent and legally binding way. It was determined that the right of a state to oppress a minority population was not tenable in modern American society and was not consistent with America's legal self-definition. However, since that determination, Americans have had to reckon with the fact that individual protectionism is far from easy to define when individuals' definitions of themselves have become increasingly pluralized. African Americans have demanded the right to have their children educated in all-Black schools; women have demanded that their daughters have access to single-sex mathematics classes; communities have embraced the ideal of community-based policing and employment as a means of urban reconstruction and enrichment.

In other words, historically discriminated-against groups — whose individual members were supposed to be protected by the individually focused anti-discrimination provisions of the Act — have rediscovered the value of communal identification. In some ways, this is fitting, given that the Act itself was made possible through sources of community identification rather than through mere individual assertion of rights. Rosa Parks may have provided a face for the bus boycott, but she was only one of many, and without "the many," the objective of the movement would not have been achieved. In the years ahead, the American legal system must find a tenable way to balance the right of association among historically discriminated-against groups — particularly those identified as minorities — while still protecting the rights of members of those groups as individuals. The law continues to shift and change in response to societal demands, as does the definition of what constitutes an individual under the law.

Works Cited

Johnson, Michael P. Reading the American Past. New York: St. Martin's, 2002.

King, Martin Luther. "I've Been to the Mountaintop." Accessed November 6, 2003.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Accessed November 6, 2003.