His experience was formative in the ways that living in a discordant state of existence always is; the promises of formal equality under the law say one thing, but the exceptions allowed by a panoply of justifications for second-class treatment created something entirely different.

XREF: Connects to critiques of formal vs. substantive equality, resonance with civil rights scholarship and legal realism.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 20