Law and Race Commons^™

Dismantling Structural Inequality: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Race-Based Policing - A Symposium Summary, Cedric Merlin Powell, Laura R. Mcneal

Cedric M. Powell

The prominence of the carceral state in American society serves to undermine basic principles of democracy and justice, disproportionately displacing people of color and excluding them from all viable avenues of citizenship.

The Structural Dimensions Of Race: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Binary Disruptions, Cedric Merlin Powell

Cedric M. Powell

Disrupting traditional conceptions of structural inequality, state decision making power, and the presumption of Black criminality, this Essay explores the doctrinal and policy implications of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own, and Paul Butler’s evocative and transformative book, Chokehold. While both books grapple with how to dismantle the structural components of mass incarceration, state legitimized police violence against Black bodies, and how policy functions to reify oppressive state power, the approaches espoused by Forman and Butler are analytically distinct. Forman locates his analysis in the dynamics of decision-making power when African American officials wield power …

The Rhetorical Allure Of Post-Racial Process Discourse And The Democratic Myth, Cedric Merlin Powell

Cedric M. Powell

We are witnessing the power of distorted and neutral rhetoric that rings with deceptive clarity. This post-racial process discourse is advanced on many levels: in political discourse, by a distrustful citizenry energized by hateful rhetoric that appeals to their concerns of being “left behind” on the basis of “preferences” for minorities that diminish America’s “greatness,” and a Court that seeks to constitutionalize a mythic democracy that promises participation while implicitly endorsing structural exclusion.

Voter initiatives should not determine the substantive core of the Fourteenth Amendment. While democratic participation is essential to our Republic, decisions like Schuette perpetuate a democratic myth …