Rajendra Wadje has posted The Hop: How Grievance Travels to Find a Premise on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay analyzes how the language of equal treatment — a grammar built to discipline power — can be borrowed by the powerful and turned against the remedies that grammar was created to secure. Its anchor is the career of a single phrase. “Our Constitution is color-blind” begins as an anti-caste weapon in Albion Tourgée’s Plessy brief and Harlan’s dissent, and ends — through Bakke, Parents Involved, and Students for Fair Admissions— as anti-classification turned against the repair of caste. The mechanism separates into parts that can be examined one at a time. A real injury becomes evidence of a system only when a premise the injury cannot supply on its own is added: a borrowed principle or a borrowed exemplar. The essay distinguishes injury, a fact about an event that belongs to the injured, from diagnosis, a contestable claim about a system; explains why a principle made ownerless in order to bind power is therefore available to power; and shows how one utterance can be heard narrowly by an institution and broadly by a constituency, while each tactical use depletes the vocabulary on which the powerless most depend. It closes by proposing the hop — a portable measure of how far a grievance must travel to borrow a victim, disciplined by one test: remove the imported exemplar and ask whether any claim about a system survives on the local record.
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