Title Vii Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 Essay

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an anti-discriminatory federal law that prohibits employers to discriminate against their employees on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, and religion. Title VII was later amended several times throughout the years to encompass other statutes such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which provides protection from employment discrimination on the basis of age and pregnancy status. (For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to restrain from being too broad). Unlike the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which only prohibits wage discrimination on the basis of sex, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides a

Expectations of substantial development of this Act were very low because of the negotiations made during the judicial process. Segregation in the south delineated and defended a racial wage gap, whereas in the northern states, workplace studies showed no indications of a racial wage gap. It took longer for several southern industries to enforce and integrate, and often required pervasive litigation. Despite legislative weaknesses and difficulty of enforcement, statistics do show, that this law improved the economic status of the protected groups, more so of African Americans, and especially in the South. Initially, “[m]anagers shared many of the same racial prejudices held by white workers, anticipating that new black hires would undermine work performance. When the experiment [of hiring blacks] was actually tried, however, the typical result was ‘no discernible difference in productivity’ between blacks and whites” (Wright 772). Even with the impact that the Civil Rights Act had, however, it did not create a post-racial society. “Title VII prohibits discrimination by race