Too often, elite clubs have driven racial and religious discrimination in America. Think of racially exclusive neighborhoods and country clubs, primary schools that didn’t allow Catholics or Jews and Ivy League colleges that once capped Jewish admissions and now do the same thing to Asian Americans.
Why did these elite places engage in discrimination, in some cases long after it was outlawed? It wasn’t just prejudice. For these clubs, discrimination served to set the elite apart from the rest of society.
Fortunately, the US Constitution and our civil-rights laws prohibit this kind of discrimination. But the lesson remains: It’s usually the elite who feel powerful enough to abandon the American principle of equality.
