Law and Race Commons^™

Evading A Race-Conscious Constitution, Cara Mcclellan

All Faculty Scholarship

The idea of a “colorblind” Constitution is front and center in cases before the Supreme Court this term, including Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina (UNC). In these cases, the same plaintiff organization, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), has asked the Supreme Court to rule that the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibit universities from considering race as one of many factors in admissions to pursue the educational benefits that flow from diversity. In support …

A Cleave Within The Piney Woods: Nacogdoches, Stephen F. Austin State University And How Racial Integration Divided The Town And Gown, Caitlin Hornback

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stephen F. Austin State University was once the pride and joy of the city of Nacogdoches, Texas. When the Texas State Legislature began to look for a location for their new state normal school, the people of the East Texas town fought to have it built there and the Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College opened its doors in September 1923 to a proud community. Through the trials and tribulations of early twentieth century events, the school managed to stay afloat and grow in numbers. Dr. Ralph W. Steen became the president of the college in 1958 and he oversaw a …

Moving From Harm Mitigation To Affirmative Discrimination Mitigation: The Untapped Potential Of Artificial Intelligence To Fight School Segregation And Other Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Andrew Gall

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic …

Branch Rickey, Affirmative Action And 'Merit' In Baseball And Education, Evan H. Caminker

Book Chapters

When General Manager Wesley Branch Rickey broke Organized Baseball’s longstanding color barrier on October 23, 1945, by signing Jackie Robinson to a contract to play for the Montreal Royals, a minor league affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey catalyzed the movement for racial justice. Millions of people saw, heard, and read about black and white men playing side-by-side. Integrating the national pastime helped challenge segregationist norms across the land, facilitating the integration of military troops and public schools soon thereafter.

Rickey’s stirring call in his 1956 Atlanta address to judge people on their merits rather than their pigmentation still resonates …

Arlington Heights Won In The Supreme Court But The Fair Housing Act’S Goal Of Promoting Racial Integration Saved The Low-Income Housing, Henry Rose

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Lisa T. Alexander

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …

Diversity Without Integration, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

The de facto racial segregation pervasive at colleges and universities across the country undermines a necessary precondition for the diversity benefits embraced by the Court in Grutter — the requirement that students partake in high-quality interracial interactions and social relationships with one another. This disjuncture between Grutter’s vision of universities as sites of robust cross-racial exchange and the reality of racial separation should be of great concern, not just because of its potential constitutional implications for affirmative action but also because it reifies racial hierarchy and reinforces inequality. Drawing from an extensive body of social science research, this article explains …

Ideology Vs. Reality: The Myth Of Equal Opportunity In A Color Blind Society, Jeffrey J. Wallace

Akron Law Review

The purpose of this discussion is to emphasize that the general assumptions of integration, equal opportunity, and racial neutrality in contemporary America are false and dichotomous assumptions, which prevent us from achieving the goal of true equality. While race is a difficult and painful subject to discuss in America, it is equally clear that without dialogue, we will not achieve the democratic values and principles we hold so dear and that drive our way of life.

The topic “What Every Teacher and Judge Should Know About Reconstruction,” provides an opportunity to open dialogue and to think critically about our values, …

The 'Compelling Government Interest' In School Diversity: Rebuilding The Case For An Affirmative Government Role, Philip Tegeler

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

How far does Justice Kennedy’s “moral and ethical obligation” to avoid racial isolation extend? Does the obligation flow primarily from Supreme Court case law, does it derive from an evolving consensus in the social sciences, or does it also have a statutory basis in Title VI and other federal law? In addition to its value as a justification for non-individualized, race-conscious remedial efforts by state and local governments, does the compelling interest identified in Parents Involved also suggest an affirmative duty on the part of the federal government? And if so, how far does this affirmative duty extend, and how …

Integration Reclaimed: A Review Of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness, Michelle Adams

Faculty Articles

Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. Today, more Americans are committed to integration than ever before. Yet this attachment to integration is hardly robust. There is a widespread perception that integration has failed. A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic resources are spent on integration. At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the "left" criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and culture. Scholars from across the political spectrum have sought to explain this …

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …

Integrating Into A Burning House: Race- And Identity-Conscious Visions In Brown's Inner City, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic and racial integration in housing remains elusive more than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Recalcitrant municipal governments and exclusionary zoning ordinances have played a large role in maintaining and exacerbating segregated housing patterns. After discussing some of the persistent causes of segregated housing patterns, this Note presents a novel approach to enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" requirement on recipients of federal housing grants. This Note presents a citizen suit that emerged from the Southern District of New York in Anti-Discrimination Center v. Westchester County, where a private …

The First Integration Of The University Of Maryland School Of Law, David S. Bogen

David S. Bogen

No abstract provided.

From Pedagogical Sociology To Constitutional Adjudication: The Meaning Of Desegregation In Social Science Research And Law, Anne Richardson Oakes

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the United States following the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) federal judges with responsibility for public school desegregation but no expertise in education or schools management appointed experts from the social sciences to act as court advisors. In Boston, MA, educational sociologists helped Judge W. Arthur Garrity design a plan with educational enhancement at its heart, but the educational outcomes were marginalized by a desegregation jurisprudence conceptualized in terms of race rather than education. This Article explores the frustration of outcomes in Boston by reference to the differing conceptualizations of desegregation in law and social science. …

Slides: Environmental Justice: Comprehensive Approach, Nicholas Targ

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Nicholas Targ, Holland & Knight, former Associate Director for Environmental Justice Integration, Office of Environmental Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

16 slides

A History Of Hollow Promises: How Choice Juisprudence Fails To Achieve Educational Equality, Anita F. Hill

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article combines analysis of case law at state and federal levels as well as federal educational policy in an effort to formulate a framework for addressing educational inequalities, of which the achievement gap is only one result. As individual rights concepts control the discourse of equal educational opportunity, community injury continues to be ignored. Because educational policy aimed at ending educational inequities is governed by equal protection analysis and guided by court decisions, limitations in legal opinions drive such policies. The lack of attention to community harm in law and educational policy limits the ability of education legal reforms …

Two "Wrongs" Do/Can Make A Right: Remembering Mathematics, Physics, & Various Legal Analogies (Two Negatives Make A Positive; Are Remedies Wrong?) The Law Has Made Him Equal, But Man Has Not, John C. Duncan Jr

Journal Publications

This article demonstrates the incomplete logic and inconsistent legal reasoning used in the argument against affirmative action. The phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" is often heard in addressing various attempts to equalize, to balance, and to correct the acknowledged wrongs of slavery and segregation and their derivative effects. Yet, "two wrongs do/can make a right" has a positive connotation. This article reviews the history of societal and judicial wrongs against Blacks, as well as the evolution of the narrowing in legal reasoning concerning discrimination against minorities, including Blacks. Next, the legal reasoning behind legacy programs will be reviewed …

Grutter V. Bollinger: This Generation's Brown V. Board Of Education, Michelle Adams

Faculty Articles

At first blush, Grutter appears to be a deviation from the body of the Court's recent affirmative action jurisprudence: it says "yes" where the other cases said "no." But it is not so clear that Grutter is a deviation from current law. Instead, it might be seen as consistent with it, in that the justification for the racial preference recognized in Grutter transcended the justifications offered in the previous cases, and the method used to achieve that end, "race as a factor," diffused rather than highlighted race. From this perspective, Grutter addressed several concerns that had troubled the Court for …

Foreword, Separate But Unequal: The Status Of America's Public Schools, James Foreman Jr.

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Symposium, convened by the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, was designed to address many of the issues raised by Donny Gonzalez, a student at a Washington, D.C. high school, on the subject of poverty and race and its effects on school-aged youth. Bringing together a diverse group of speakers and attracting a broad cross-section of the university and Ann Arbor communities, the Separate but Unequal Symposium addressed a range of issues, including: the ongoing relevance of integration, the role of charter schools and other alternative programs, and promising strategies for achieving greater educational equality. A theme linking …

Building Community In The Twenty-First Century: A Post-Integrationist Vision For The American Metropolis, Sheryll D. Cashin

Michigan Law Review

[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote this prophetic statement at the dawn of the twentieth century, the American metropolis did not yet exist. Perhaps DuBois could not have predicted the sprawled, socioeconomically fragmented landscape that is so familiar to the majority of Americans who now live and work in metropolitan regions. But his prediction of a "color line" that would sear our consciousness and present the chief social struggle for the new century proved all too correct. As we contemplate the twenty-first century, Gerald Frug's book, City Making, makes clear …

The Influence Of Race In School Finance Reform, James E. Ryan

Michigan Law Review

It would be an exaggeration to say that school finance reform is all about race, but largely in the same way that it is an exaggeration to say that welfare reform is all about race. Like welfare reform, the controversy generated by school finance litigation and reform has, on the surface, little to do with race. Battles over school funding, which have been waged in nearly forty state supreme courts and at least as many state legislatures, instead appear to be over such issues as the redistribution of resources, retaining local control over education, and the efficacy of increased expenditures. …

The Challenge Of Indigenous Self-Determination, Russel Lawrence Barsh

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Earth Summit at Rio was the first global negotiation in which indigenous peoples participated directly. They did so with the aim of advocating land rights and greater self-determination in the fields of natural-resource management and development. They justified these claims by arguing that indigenous peoples are superior stewards of the land and that strengthening indigenous peoples' traditional economies would contribute to solving global ecological and economic problems. This approach succeeded all too well. Jaded diplomats and environmental ministers seized on the hopeful possibility that indigenous economics actually might work better than discredited socialism and overextended capitalism, and they invited …

The First Integration Of The University Of Maryland School Of Law, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bakke: A Compelling Need To Discriminate, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Two of America's most cherished values collided head-on a few months ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court began to come to grips with the most significant civil rights suit since the school desegregation cases of 1954. Arrayed on one side is the principle of governmental "color-blindness," the appealing notion that the color of a person's skin should have nothing to do with the distribution of benefits or burdens by the state. Set against it is the goal of a truly integrated society, and the tragic realization that this objective cannot be achieved within the foreseeable future unless race and color …

Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Legality Of Plans For Maintaining School Segregation, John B. Huck

Michigan Law Review

On May 19, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that segregation in public schools was a denial of equal protection of the law. Since that date many and varied plans have been proposed to maintain segregated education by avoiding the impact of the decision. The legality of three of these proposed avoidance devices will be analyzed in this comment.