Law and Race Commons^™

Understanding An American Paradox: An Overview Of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Spearit

Articles

In The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Sahar Aziz unveils a mechanism that perpetuates the persecution of religion. While the book’s title suggests a problem that engulfs Muslims, it is not a new problem, but instead a recurring theme in American history. Aziz constructs a model that demonstrates how racialization of a religious group imposes racial characteristics on that group, imbuing it with racial stereotypes that effectively treat the group as a racial rather than religious group deserving of religious liberty.

In identifying a racialization process that effectively veils religious discrimination, Aziz’s book points to several important …

How The “Black Criminal” Stereotype Shapes Black People’S Psychological Experience Of Policing: Evidence Of Stereotype Threat And Remaining Questions, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the U.S. originated in and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters …

Color Of Creatorship - Author's Response, Anjali Vats

Articles

This essay is the author's response to three reviews of The Color of Creatorship written by notable intellectual property scholars and published in the IP Law Book Review.

The Racial Politics Of Fair Use Fetishism, Anjali Vats

Articles

This short essay argues that the sometimes fetishistic desire on the part of progressive intellectual property scholars to defend fair use is at odds with racial justice. Through a rereading of landmark fair use cases using tools drawing from Critical Race Intellectual Property (“CRTIP”), it contends that scholars, lawyers, judges, practitioners, and activists would be well served by focusing on how fair use remains grounded in whiteness as (intellectual) property. It argues for doing so by rethinking the purpose of the Copyright Act of 1976 to be inclusive of Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors.

Race-Specific, State-Specific Covid-19 Vaccination Rates Adjusted For Age, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Kaitlyn M. Berry, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Black state median vaccination rates are, respectively, 89 percent and 76 percent of what would be predicted on the basis of age; Hispanic and Native rates are almost identical to what would be predicted; and Asian American/Pacific Islander rates are 110 percent of what would be …

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications For Law, Carmen G. Gonzalez, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, …

To What Extent Is The Death Penalty A Tool Of Racial Terror In America, And How Can We Fix It?, Gabrielle Boileau

Honors Projects

In this project, I seek to answer the question: To what extent is the death penalty a tool of racial terror in America, and how can we fix it? America has long been plagued by the legacy of slavery and white supremacy. In the reconstruction era, when slavery was no longer legal, angry white citizens would simply round up African-Americans and lynch them if they felt they had done something “wrong”. However, in the modern era, such blatant displays of racism are illegal, and the racist views of society are subverted into the court system. Black men are disproportionately arrested …

Prisons, Nursing Homes, And Medicaid: A Covid-19 Case Study In Health Injustice, Mary Crossley

Articles

The unevenly distributed pain and suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic present a remarkable case study. Considering why the coronavirus has devastated some groups more than others offers a concrete example of abstract concepts like “structural discrimination” and “institutional racism,” an example measured in lives lost, families shattered, and unremitting anxiety. This essay highlights the experiences of Black people and disabled people, and how societal choices have caused them to experience the brunt of the pandemic. It focuses on prisons and nursing homes—institutions that emerged as COVID-19 hotspots –and on the Medicaid program.

Black and disabled people are disproportionately represented in …

Temporality In A Time Of Tam, Or Towards A Racial Chronopolitics Of Intellectual Property Law, Anjali Vats

Articles

This Article examines the intersections of race, intellectual property, and temporality from the vantage point of Critical Race Intellectual Property ("CRTIP"). More specifically, it offers one example of how trademark law operates to normalize white supremacy by and through judicial frameworks that default to Euro-American understandings of time. I advance its central argument-that achieving racial justice in the context of intellectual property law requires decolonizing Euro-American conceptions of time by considering how the equitable defense of laches and the judicial power to raise issues sua sponte operate in trademark law. I make this argument through a close reading of the …

Reckoning With Race And Disability, Jasmine E. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

Our national reckoning with race and inequality must include disability. Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history. Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy. This approach has ignored the ways in which states have relied on disability as a tool of subordination, leading to the invisibility of disabled people of color in civil rights movements and an incomplete theoretical and remedial framework for contemporary justice initiatives. Legal scholars …

Mine The Gap: Using Racial Disparities To Expose And Eradicate Racism, James S. Liebman, Kayla C. Butler, Ian Buksunski

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, lawyers and legal scholars have disagreed over how much resource redistribution to expect from federal courts and Congress in satisfaction of the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection. Of particular importance to this debate and to the nation given its kaleidoscopic history of inequality, is the question of racial redistribution of resources. A key dimension of that question is whether to accept the Supreme Court's limitation of equal protection to public actors' disparate treatment of members of different races or instead demand constitutional remedies for the racially disparate impact of public action.

For a substantial segment of the …

Creating And Undoing Legacies Of Resilience: Black Women As Martyrs In The Black Community Under Oppressive Social Control, Leah Iman Aniefuna, M. Amari Aniefuna, Jason M. Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper contextualizes the struggles and contributions of Black motherhood and reproductive justice under police surveillance in Baltimore, Maryland. We conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers regarding their experiences and perceptions of policing in their community during the aftermath of the police-involved death of Freddie Gray. While the literature disproportionately focuses on Black males, little knowledge is known about the struggles and contributions of Black mothers in matters concerning police brutality and the fight against institutional violence. There still remains the question regarding the role of and impact on Black mothers during matters of institutional violence against Black children. We fill …

The Color Of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, And The Making Of Americans (Introduction), Anjali Vats

Book Chapters

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, the body of legal doctrine and practice that governs the ownership of information, is animated by a dichotomy of creatorship and infringement. In the most often repeated narratives of creatorship/infringement in the United States, the former produces a social and economic good while the latter works against the production of that social and economic good. Creators, those individuals whose work is deemed protectable under copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and unfair competition law, create valuable products that contribute to economic growth and public knowledge. Infringers, those individuals who use the work of creators without their permission, steal …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Genetic Race? Dna Ancestry Tests, Racial Identity, And The Law, Trina Jones, Jessica L. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

Can genetic tests determine race? Americans are fascinated with DNA ancestry testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Indeed, in recent years, some people have changed their racial identity based upon DNA ancestry tests and have sought to use test results in lawsuits and for other strategic purposes. Courts may be similarly tempted to use genetic ancestry in determining race. In this Essay, we examine the ways in which DNA ancestry tests may affect contemporary understandings of racial identity. We argue that these tests are poor proxies for race because they fail to reflect the social, cultural, relational, and experiential norms …

Uncovering Juror Racial Bias, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The presence of bias in the courtroom has the potential to undermine public faith in the adversarial process, distort trial outcomes, and obfuscate the search for justice. In Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments required post-verdict judicial inquiry in criminal cases where racial bias clearly served as a “significant motivating factor” in juror decision-making. Courts will nonetheless likely struggle in interpreting what constitutes a "clear statement of racial bias" and whether such bias constituted a "significant motivating factor" in a juror's verdict. This Article will examine how …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

The Exceptional Negro: Racism, White Privilege And The Lie Of Respectability Politics, Traci Ellis

Publications & Research

Overwhelmingly, black folks have close encounters on a regular basis with being marginalized, insulted, dismissed and discriminated against. It is the natural consequence of still being considered little more than a Negro in this country. Especially for the “Exceptional Negroes.” But, as we will see, the truth is that even with our exceptionalism, we are still just “Negroes” to white America and in case we forget that, they will swiftly remind us.

Critical Race Ip, Anjali Vats, Deidre A. Keller

Articles

In this Article, written on the heels of Race IP 2017, a conference we co-organized with Amit Basole and Jessica Silbey, we propose and articulate a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary movement that we call Critical Race Intellectual Property (Critical Race IP). Specifically, we argue that given trends toward maximalist intellectual property policy, it is now more important than ever to study the racial investments and implications of the laws of copyright, trademark, patent, right of publicity, trade secret, and unfair competition in a manner that draws upon Critical Race Theory (CRT). Situating our argument in a historical context, we …

Contact Is A Stronger Predictor Of Attitudes Toward Police Than Race: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Amy Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey

Social Work Publications

Purpose – This scoping review thoroughly scanned research on race, contacts with police and attitudes toward police. An exploratory meta-analysis then assessed the strength of their associations and interaction in Canada and the USA. Key knowledge gaps and specific future research needs, synthetic and primary, were identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – A germinal methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). The authors searched for published or unpublished research over the past 15 years and retrieved 33 eligible surveys, 19 of which were included in a sample-weighted meta-analysis.

Findings – The …

Positive Education Federalism: The Promise Of Equality After The Every Student Succeeds Act, Christian Sundquist

Articles

This Article examines the nature of the federal role in public education following the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in December 2015 (“ESSA”). Public education was largely unregulated for much of our Nation’s history, with the federal government deferring to states’ traditional “police powers” despite the de jure entrenchment of racial and class-based inequalities. A nascent policy of education federalism finally took root following the Brown v. Board decision and the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary School Act (“ESEA”) with the explicit purpose of eradicating such educational inequality.

This timely Article argues that current federal education …

Beyond The 'Resiliency' And 'Grit' Narrative In Legal Education: Race, Class And Gender Considerations, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Law schools have been struggling to adapt to the “new normal” of decreased enrollments and a significantly altered legal employment market. Despite the decrease in traditional attorney jobs, as well as the possibility that artificial intelligence systems such as “ROSS” will displace additional jobs in the future, there still remains a significant gap in legal services available to the poor, middle class, and immigrants. The integration of social justice methodologies in the classroom thus has become critically important to the future of legal education and of the very practice of law.

Many commentators on the future of legal education have …

Institutionalized Racism And The Death Penalty, Ashleigh Ellis

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Overtime, support for capital punishment has evolved. Compared to previous decades, support has changed amongst different variables such as: age, race, gender, and political perspective; therefore, today, these variables have changed the amount of support for it. For example, as of today, 6 states have repealed the death penalty with New Jersey being the first in 2007 to do so in 40 years. As memories of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era have faded due to generational replacement, American society today still has this racial gap, however it is due to this racial resentment or symbolic resentment that the …

The Highly Political Supreme Court, Riley Lane Munks

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper investigates whether Republicans or Democrats support a strong Supreme Court and why. Furthermore, by analyzing data from the 2012 American National Election Survey, I will study support of the court based on gender, age, and race. Since the early 1980’s the court has taken a strong conservative direction, to the dismay of many liberals. Republicans feel comfortable sending a congressional dispute to the courts while Democrats may feel disenfranchised with the judicial process. I also believe that younger people believe the court is an outdated method of making laws and interpreting the constitution. Originally the Supreme Court was …

A Multicultural Grassroots Effort To Reduce Ethnic And Racial Social Distance Among Middle School Students, Christopher Donoghue, David Brandwein

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Raising tolerance for people of different ethnic and racial groups is the goal of the Multicultural Mosaic program, a grass-roots multicultural education effort initiated by a small group of middle school teachers in a private school in the northeast. After years of enjoying the comforts of a modern, but European-based, curriculum, these teachers took the initiative to pursue an ambitious transformation of their entire school's approach to pedagogy. Not only would the English teachers introduce new texts by foreign authors and the social studies teachers introduce new materials on the history of non-Western cultures, but also the teachers of mathematics …

The Thirteenth Amendment And Interest Convergence, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment was intended to eliminate the institution of slavery and to eliminate the legacy of slavery. Having accomplished the former, the Amendment has only rarely been extended to the latter. The Thirteenth Amendment’s great promise therefore remains unrealized.

This Article explores the gap between the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise and its implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, this Article argues that the relative underdevelopment of Thirteenth Amendment doctrine is due in part to a lack of perceived interest convergence in eliminating what the Amendment’s Framers called the “badges and incidents of slavery.” The theory of interest convergence, in its …

The Declining Significance Of Presidential Races?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Osamudia R. James

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Meaning Of Race In The Dna Era: Science, History And The Law, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The meaning of “race” has changed dramatically over time. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, moral and physical values to perceived physical differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-white persons. Nazi Germany applied these understandings of race in a manner which shocked the world, and following World War II the concept of race increasingly came to be …

Judicial Review Of Thirteenth Amendment Legislation: 'Congruence And Proportionality' Or 'Necessary And Proper'?, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment has relatively recently been rediscovered by scholars and litigants as a source of civil rights protections. Most of the scholarship focuses on judicial enforcement of the Amendment in lawsuits brought by individuals. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention as of late to the proper scope of congressional action enforcing the Amendment. The reason, presumably, is that it is fairly well settled that Congress enjoys very broad authority to determine what constitutes either literal slavery or, to use the language of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., a "badge or incident of slavery" falling within the Amendment's …