One of the greatest threats to equality is complacency. Those who do nothing while witnessing injustice and wrongdoing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, do worse than those who commit acts of injustice. Social scientists, too, recognize that complacency is a foe of justice; they have long recognized that bystanders become part of injustice, emboldening bad actors by suggesting to them that their conduct is unobjectionable. And when acts of injustice are against children, who often cannot protect themselves, complacency is all the more troubling. It is no surprise, then, that federal civil rights laws impose liability on school districts that ignore wrongdoing against children. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, for example, imposes liability on school districts that fail to intervene when a child with disabilities is bullied.
That said, we often overlook complacency’s role in perpetuating inequality. Sure, the idea that complacency threatens equality is intuitive, but identifying how complacency undermines specific civil rights can prove difficult. Complacency impedes civil rights in insidious ways. When school districts ignore injustice, though, the consequences are hard to overlook.
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