Law and Race Commons^™

Whiteness As Innocence, David Simson

Articles & Chapters

Current antidiscrimination law is exceedingly hostile to the project of race-conscious remediation—the conscious use of race to mitigate America’s persistent racial hierarchy. This Article argues that this broad hostility can be traced in significant part to what I call “Whiteness as Innocence” ideology. This ideology is a system of legal reasoning by which the formal principle of equality is filled with the substantive principle of white racial dominance via invocations of white innocence. That is, under this ideology, ideas about white innocence influence legal decisions on who is “alike” and “unalike” and what constitutes “alike” and “unalike” treatment in race-conscious …

Making Room For Critical Race Theory In International Law: Some Practical Pointers, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

In addition to assessing the pertinence of critical race theory in unmasking international law's colonial, racist and patriarchal underpinnings, this paper attempts to suggest practical ways in which a critical race theoryapproach can enrich the international legal system, by giving a voice to the voiceless and by addressing the conditions of marginality in which much of the developing world is trapped.

This paper will do three things. First, it will peruse the contemporary global situation with respect to international law and human rights. Second, it will assess the contribution of critical race theory in advancing an understanding of, and solution …