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Religion Law

University of Michigan Law School

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Theology

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Racism As "The Nation's Crucial Sin": Theology And Derrick Bell, George H. Taylor Jan 2004

Racism As "The Nation's Crucial Sin": Theology And Derrick Bell, George H. Taylor

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Part I develops Bell's thesis that racism is permanent, an ineradicable structure in American life. Bell's stance here is unrelenting and a direct and deep challenge to liberal notions of racial progress. This section draws out the social facts Bell provides about the status of Blacks in American society and examines Bell's argument for the continuing disparity between the races, particularly the claim that Whites hold on to a property in Whiteness. Part II analyzes Bell's call for action despite racism's permanence. Part III develops Niebuhr's theology of the possibility of action despite sin. Niebuhr too criticizes the liberal-and liberal …


Blood Will Tell: Scientific Racism And The Legal Prohibitions Against Miscegenation, Keith E. Sealing Jan 2000

Blood Will Tell: Scientific Racism And The Legal Prohibitions Against Miscegenation, Keith E. Sealing

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This article first examines the miscegenation paradigm in terms of a seven-point conceptual framework that not merely allowed but practically demanded anti-miscegenation laws, then looks at the legal arguments state courts used to justify the constitutionality of such laws through 1967. Next, it analyzes the Biblical argument, which in its own right justified miscegenation, but also had a major influence on the development of the three major strands of scientific racism: monogenism, polygenism and Darwinian theory. It then probes the concept upon which the entire edifice is constructed-race--and discusses the continuing vitality of this construct. Next, this article turns to …