Law Commons^™

The Perils Of Asian-American Erasure, Matthew P. Shaw

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Affirmative action, particularly its most well-known variant, race-conscious college admissions practices, has long occupied a precarious position in constitutional jurisprudence of equal protection and statutory antidiscrimination law. As a policy matter, affirmative action practices are necessary to reduce the impact of durable structural barriers to opportunity that have been imposed on members of identifiable racial groups because of their race. Legally, they’re on far less secure footing.

As a constitutional matter, these measures have been summarily divorced from any reparative purpose since the “diversity rationale” emerged from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke as the only compelling interest …

Rejecting Honorary Whiteness: Asian Americans And The Attack On Race-Conscious Admissions, Philip Lee

Faculty Publications

Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been labeled by the dominant society as the “model minority.” This status is commonly juxtaposed against so-called “problem” minorities such as African Americans and Latinx Americans. In theory, the model minority narrative serves as living proof that racial barriers to social and economic development no longer exist in America. If Asians can succeed against all odds, the reasoning goes, so can everyone else. Further, if a member of a minority group fails, it is because of their own lack of diligence and ambition, and not some supposed systemic unfairness. However, the model minority narrative …

Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About The Internment Of Japanese Americans, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment from 1942 through 2007. It argues that while later film narratives, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony. Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template … Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities — hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori’s documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon (2004), …

Peace In The Valley: For Chris Iijima, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The first time I saw Chris, he was speaking at a meeting of the East Coast Asian American Student Union, a semi-political but largely social gathering of college kids. I have learned over the years that law schools are adept at finding faculty of color who are smart and ineffectual. So, frankly, I was not expecting much when this Professor Iijima got up to talk. I was concentrating on preparing my own remarks, when I was hit by the whirlwind that is the public Chris Iijima. He got up and assumed the posture of a pugilistic grizzly bear. He actually …

Planet Asian America, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In forming the Asian Law Caucus, the elders - some of whom are here in this room - chose resistance. They created a space in which Asian Americans were in charge, deciding what mattered to them and what strategies worked for them. If someone else were in charge, things would have gone differently. Risks were taken, and victories were won that would not have happened using traditional litigation strategies or leaving the work to traditional civil rights organizations. It was important to create an Asian American space to do this work: to fight Chinatown evictions, to pursue redress for the …