 Schutz composed “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World” at the time of the legal decision of Brown v. Board of Education that ended racially segregated education in the United States. With typical dispassion, Schutz explains how the meaning of the term “equality” depends on the domain of relevances to which it pertains (e.g., economic equality, equality of civil rights, etc.) and on the in-group or out-group utilizing it—and here he conceives interpretation in terms of groups rather than individuals. He spends most of the essay contrasting subjective and objective interpretations of group membership, equality, and equality of opportunity, construing “subjective” and “objective” in terms of in-group and out-group interpretations. As regards group membership, he illustrates that the mere categorization of another as a member of a group need not be discriminatory, but depends upon an appropriate evaluation of the category from the viewpoint of the categorized individual. In-groups and out-groups differ in whether they understand equality merely as “formal,” i.e., as nondiscrimination, or “real,” calling for special rights and services. Similarly groups think of equality of opportunity from an out-group perspective as “the career open to all” without appreciating how in-group members might subjectively experience insuperable obstacles in trying to avail themselves of opportunities supposedly objectively equal. In this essay, Schutz is concerned not to present a final definition of equality, but to highlight the differences between in-group and out-group understandings that serve as the preconditions of any discussion about it.