Law and Race Commons^™

The Un-Balanced Fourth Amendment: A Cultural Study Of The Drug War, Racial Profiling And Arvizu, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this Article, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper provides a cultural studies approach to the encoding and decoding of the drug war that will allow us to draw important conclusions about the effects of the drug war on the Court. In Part I of this Article, he describes how the field of cultural studies reads popular culture through the analytical tools of "encoding" and "decoding." In Part II, he analyzes why and how law enforcement has encoded the drug war as requiring increased prosecution of drug users and drug dealers. In Part III, he considers how the Court's decoding of law …

Understanding "Depolicing": Symbiosis Theory And Critical Cultural Theory, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Doctrinal analyses help us understand what law does. Identity theory helps us understand why law operates in certain ways. Cultural studies can help us understand that where law operates is crucial to both how it operates, and on whom.

Nancy Ehrenreich's Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support Between Subordinating Systems is especially valuable because her symbiosis theory expands identity theory. Ehrenreich turns our attention to the subjectivities of those who are partly subordinated but mostly privileged-those who accept their own oppression in return for the "compensation" of being able to use the law to subordinate others. Nonetheless, symbiosis theory …

Executing White Masculinities: Lessons From Karla Faye Tucker, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Gender is a constant struggle. Throughout our lives, we contend with multiple unstable and oppositional social constructions of gender, or hierarchies of masculinities and femininities. Knowing, or trying to know, who is male and who is female, and how men and women should act, is a major part of the structure of our identities, our societies, and our democracy. These gender questions are not separate from race or class; together for example, they shape what is expected of a poor young White man or a middle-class, African American grandmother. Racialized and class-based, gender helps to tell us who is frightening, …