We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making. 

Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, and occupation” (33). However, in a civil society, the aforementioned distinctions are free to run their course. A civil society is the functioning of civilization beyond government. Such a society, which operates outside political right, is one in which man “acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers” (34). Essentially, man is reduced to his individualistic self, separated from the equality of a political society and forced to reckon with the inequalities of property, commerce, and mankind's material way of life.

In Brown vs Board of Education, the state purportedly abolished the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that had dominated civil rights proceedings before. To Marx, this would be a significant advancement in the political rights of man. He writes, “[p]olitical emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order.” (35). Where he would take issue with this ruling, however, is the fact that it changes not the rights of a “private person”. Outside political society, this ruling did nothing to quell the notion of ‘separate but equal’ within the “private lives of men.” The private lives of African Americans were rendered equal in political capacity, but they remained separate in a private capacity. Essentially, the state could declare sameness before the law, but it could not abolish the social relations that generate inequality in the first place, because those exist in civil society, in a dimension untainted by the accordance of political rights to man.

Absent the government, I believe Marx’s idea of differentiating between the “rights of man” and “rights of citizen” can be applied to most other institutions, in which the presence of “separate but equal” is pervasive and quite apparent. Take, for example, a class at CMC. 

In any given classroom, students are all taught in a manner without prejudice; they are all given the same responsibilities of schoolwork; and they are all expected to abide by the same academic standards. Yet outside of classes, separate from the institution but still on its grounds, this notion of equality dissolves rapidly. Students differ so vastly in their economic backgrounds, social capital, and lived experience that the equality guaranteed within the classroom does not translate into equality in their “private lives” on campus. We remain separate in our private lives, yet are given the illusion of being equal as students of this college. Granted, institutions such as CMC make no promises to save us from all societal problems, inequality included. But much like the modern state in Marx’s account, the university guarantees equality in its own quarters, while leaving exogenous inequality intact, preserving the disparity in the “rights of students” and the “rights of man”.