Williams, Patricia.
"Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping
in Singular Times." Harvard Law Review 104.2 (1990): 544.Furthermore, the complication of this rhetoric, an ironic result of the judicial desire to simplify, seems to have resulted in an odd and risky quest by the Metro Broadcasting dissents to be rid not only of any undue power to discriminate negatively, but also of the very ability to be discriminating in any sensitive, curious, or moral way. As I have written elsewhere, the idea that an egalitarian society can be achieved or maintained through the mechanism of blind neutrality is fallacious. Racial discrimination is powerful precisely because of its frequent invisibility, its felt neutrality. After all, the original sense of discrimination was one of discernment, of refinement, of choice, of value judgment-the courteous deflection to the noble rather than the base. It is that complicated social milieu that must be remembered as the backdrop to what both the majority and dissenters refer to as "preferences" in this case. Racism inscribes culture with generalized preferences and routinized notions of propriety. It is aspiration as much as condemnation; it is an aesthetic. It empowers the mere familiarity and comfort of the status quo by labeling that status quo as "natural." If we are to reach the deep roots of this legacy, antidiscrimination must be a commitment not merely to undo the words of forced division, but also to undo the consequences of oppressive acts. As in the old saw about the two horses given "equal" opportunity to run a race, but one of whom has a stone in its shoe, the failure to take into account history and context can radically alter whether mere neutrality can be deemed just.