Passage Based Questions: Legal Aptitude - 18 | Passage Based Questions for CLAT Preparation PDF Download

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions.
Sport is often a microcosm of society. Much as we might sometimes see it as a leveller, it invariable tends to underscore more endemic inequities. Recent revelations made by the former West Indies cricket captain. Darren Sammy, therefore, must awaken us to a problem that goes far beyond the cricket field and its narrow confines, of a society replete with racism.
In our country, this problem is only exacerbated by other historically ingrained forms of discrimination, along the lines of caste, class, gender, and religion among other things. Indeed , in reacting to Mr. Sammy’s statements , the former Indian cricket Irfan Pathan pointed not only to how players from the south of India routinely faced abuse from the crowds in the north – something which the Tamil Nadu and India opener Abhinav Mukund too attested to – but also to another form of prejudice even more entrenched in society. On June 9, Mr. Pathan said , in a tweet, that racism in our country goes beyond the colour of our skins , that enforcing embargoes on people seeking to buy houses based on their faith, ought to equally be seen as a feature of prejudice.
These prejudices, which pervade every aspect of life, from access to basic goods, to education and employment, are sometimes manifest. But, on other occasions, the discrimination is indirect and even unintended. The latter, however, is just as pernicious. The forms that it takes were perhaps best explained by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Griggs vs Duke Power Co. (1971). There, the court held that an energy company had fallen foul to the U. S. Civil Rights Act of 1964- which made racial discrimination in private workplaces illegal – by insisting on a superfluous written test by applicants for its better entry- level jobs. Although, on the face of it, this requirement was race-neutral, in practice it allowed the company to victimise African-Americans.
In a memorable judgment, invoking an Aesop fable, Chief Justice Burger wrote that “tests or criteria for employment or promotion may not provide equality of opportunity merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox”. On the contrary, the law, he said, resorting again to the fable, “provided that the vessel in which the milk is proffered be one all seekers can use.” That is, that it wasn’t merely “overt discrimination” that was illegal but also “practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation”.