But Mr. Yoshino says that by focusing on immutable traits, the race model obscures other forms of discrimination that all groups -- even blacks -- may be subject to but that are not forbidden by the law.
As Sen and Wasow (2014) argue, race is a social construct based on a mixture of both mutable and immutable traits including skin color, religion, location and diet.
[Damore's] statements about immutable traits linked to sex such as women's heightened neuroticism and men's prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak [his] comments with "scientific" references and analysis, and notwithstanding [his] "not all women" disclaimers.
Homosexuality, for example, is so far not considered an immutable trait by the courts.
Since the anti-segregation cases of the late 1950's, courts have generally required proof that a person was being denied the law's equal protection because of an immutable trait, one that was inborn or could not be changed.
Thus, Richard Kahlenberg asserts that racial discrimination is unjust because race is such an immutable trait.
(1992: 16) Additionally, a paradigmatic ground of discrimination, a person's religion, is not an immutable trait, nor are some forms of disability.
It's just not relevant," he said, referring to Marcus Bachmann's Christian counseling company and the Bachmanns' belief that homosexuality is a behavior, not an immutable trait.
The House legal team also says that gay people can't consider their sexuality an "immutable" trait, like race or gender, and can't argue that DOMA violates their fundamental rights because it doesn't keep anyone from building a family with his or her same-sex partner.
Moreover, with optimism construed as a stable, relatively immutable trait, it is not at all clear how it is relevant to intervention, except perhaps as a plausible, but generally untested moderator variable to be taken into account in tailoring interventions.
The notion that being optimistic improves health is invoked in promoting positive psychology intervention research and in the marketing of positive psychology as a commercial enterprise, even if, ironically, optimism is theoretically a relatively immutable trait.
