When Is Discrimination Wrong?

MoJers might be interested in a new book by Deborah Hellman from Harvard UP titled When Is Discrimination Wrong?  Over at Balkinization, she's laying out her thesis in a series of posts.  Here's an excerpt:

Thus the question that must guide our inquiry is when does differentiation fail to treat the people affected as people of equal worth? The answer, in my view, is this: discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning and not wrong when it is not demeaning. This clean and simple formulation clearly raises many questions and likely engenders much disagreement. . . .
But why think demeaning is the key to what makes discrimination wrong? To demean someone is to treat that person as a person of lesser worth. Demeaning has both an expressive dimension and a power dimension. To demean is both to express that the other is less worthy and to do so in a way that has the ability to put the other down. Demeaning discrimination is thus differentiation that fails to treat those affected as moral equals. Demeaning is the key to what makes discrimination wrong because it responds to the moral concern that animates worries about differentiation in the first place.