The Supreme Court did the right thing in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. That’s the actual name of the case that the media mockingly reported with headlines about a “straight woman” claiming “reverse discrimination”.

There is no such thing as “reverse discrimination”. Only discrimination. It’s either discrimination or not.

The term “reverse discrimination” implies that discriminating against white people is somehow not discrimination, a lesser form of discrimination or some sort of aberration that doesn’t really exist.

That was also the issue at the heart of Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services which was not about the question of whether Marlean Ames was actually discriminated against, but whether white people should have to meet a higher bar to prove not ‘discrimination’, but ‘reverse discrimination’.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling striking down different discrimination standards was written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, of all people, (usually done to limit the application of an inevitable decision) and these are her words. “the Sixth Circuit held that Ames had failed to meet her prima facie burden because she had not shown “ ‘background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.’ ” The court reasoned that Ames, as a straight woman, was required to make this showing “in addition to the usual ones for establishing a primafacie case.”

The Sixth Circuit’s “background circumstances” rule requires plaintiffs who are members of a majority group to bear an additional burden at step one. But the text of Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. The provision focuses on individuals rather than groups, barring discrimination against “any individual” because of protected characteristics. Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone..

The majority ruling, as I said, is tepid, noting that Congress did not allow such discriminatory treatment, rather than that the discriminatory treatment is inherently illegal, but it still gets at the core problem in the case.

The Court of Appeals explicitly held that “Ames is heterosexual . . . which means she must make a showing in addition to the usual ones for establishing a prima-facie case.”

It’s inherently discriminatory concepts like ‘reverse discrimination’ that make that kind of discrimination seem reasonable.