Law and Race Commons^™

Racial Triangulation, Interest-Convergence, And The Double-Consciousness Of Asian Americans, Vinay Harpalani

Georgia State University Law Review

This Essay integrates Professor Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation framework, Professor Derrick Bell’s interest-convergence theory, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness, all to examine the racial positioning of Asian Americans and the dilemmas we face as a result. To do so, this Essay considers the history of Asian immigration to the United States, the model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes, Asian Americans’ positioning in the affirmative action debate, COVID-19-related hate and bias incidents, and Andrew Yang’s 2020 Democratic presidential candidacy. The Essay examines how racial stereotypes of Asian Americans have emerged through historical cycles of valorization and ostracism, as …

Less Prison Time Matters: A Roadmap To Reducing The Discriminatory Impact Of The Sentencing System Against African Americans And Indigenous Australians, Mirko Bagaric

Georgia State University Law Review

The criminal justice system discriminates against African Americans. There are a number of stages of the criminal justice process. Sentencing is the sharp end of the system because this is where the community acts in its most coercive manner by intentionally inflecting hardships on offenders. African Americans comprise approximately 40% of the incarcerated population yet only about 13% of the total population. The overrepresentation of African Americans in prisons is repugnant. Despite this, lawmakers for decades have been unable or unwilling to implement reforms which ameliorate the problem. This is no longer politically or socially tolerable in light of the …

Deficit Frame Dangers, Jonathan P. Feingold

Georgia State University Law Review

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as an essential, if insufficient, catalyst of social change. In part, it is. But in critical respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, civil rights litigation can hinder short- and long-term projects of racial justice. Specifically, certain civil rights doctrines reward plaintiffs for emphasizing community deficits—or what I term a “deficit frame.” Legal doctrine, in other words, invites legal narratives that track, activate, and reinforce pernicious racial stereotypes. This dynamic, even in the context of well-intended litigation, risks entrenching conditions that drive racial inequality—including the conditions that litigation is often intended to address. …

The Last Call For Civil Rights: Toward Economic Equality, Steve Lee

Georgia State University Law Review

Over six decades have passed since the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s, but American society has not yet fully realized the promise of the civil rights movement, which at its core embodies the protection and promotion of equity and dignity of all people. Despite the historic improvements that accord the legal protection of equal rights among different races, genders, and ethnic groups, significant economic disparity among racial and regional lines persists. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.” However, the pursuit of economic equality has not been …

Police Use Of Force Laws In Texas, Gerald S. Reamey

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series: Book Release Kick Off Celebration 09-15-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law, City University Of New York School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Rebellious Lawyers For Fair Housing: The Lost Scientific Model Of The Early Naacp, John Bliss

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Historically-rooted patterns of racial segregation in housing remain a significant contributor to racial inequities in health, intergenerational wealth, and life chances more generally. This article uncovers a powerful but long-forgotten model for rebellious lawyers in the struggle for fair housing. I draw this model from archival research into the innovative early NAACP lawyers who litigated racially restrictive covenants from the 1910s to the 1940s. Facing a hostile judiciary, and with little legal precedent on their side, these lawyers turned their attention to a fundamental conceptual obstacle to their cause: what they termed “property in a sociological vacuum.” In this view, …

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Professors Karen Boxx And Gregory Hicks, May V. County Of Spokane, 199 Wash.2d 389 (2022) (No. 99598-2), Karen Boxx, Greg Hicks

Court Briefs

This case raises the difficult question of how to deal with the stain of racial restrictive covenants that have long been rendered unenforceable and illegal but remain in the property records. Petitioner is seeking to have such an offending covenant physically removed from the public records relating to his real property under authority of former Washington statute RCW 49.60.227 (2018). Since Petitioner has begun this quest, the legislature amended RCW 49.60.227 to provide a more detailed procedure to address the remnants of racism in property records, but this new procedure does not afford Petitioner the remedy that he sought under …

Blue Racing: The Racialization Of Police In Hate Crime Statutes, Christopher Williams

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Content warning: this Article discusses police brutality.

The relationship between race, law, and policing is one that has been analyzed by many scholars throughout U.S. history. The vast majority of research about police has highlighted policing in relation to groups they police, focusing on areas such as policing practices, policies, or involvement in the racialization of minority groups. This scholarship has far outpaced research on actions taken by law enforcement on behalf of law enforcement— specifically, how law enforcement engages in racialization out of self-interest. A better understanding of the ways in which law enforcement engages in racialization that is …

Commercial Sex And Exploitation, Judge Barbara Mack, Dana Raigrodski

Chapters in Books

Commercial sexual exploitation (CSE), including sex trafficking, mainly targets women, children, young adults (up to age 24), and individuals identifying as LGBTQ+, primarily in communities in poverty, Indigenous communities, and communities of color. Economic and social marginalization drives people into the commercial sex industry and exploitation, which in turn perpetuates that economic and social marginalization. The most targeted and marginalized populations have been doubly harmed by exploitation and by poor treatment within the legal system.

While data is limited, CSE is widespread in the sex industry in Washington State and nationally. State and national data show significant disparities based on …

The Enemy Is The Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, And The Prohibition Of Nonconsensual Sterilizations, Sophia Shepherd

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article describes the legal history of how, twenty years after the sterilizations began, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in 1978, finally created regulations that prohibited the sterilizations. It tells the heroic story of Connie Redbird Uri, a Native American physician and lawyer, who discovered the secret program of government sterilizations, and created a movement that pressured the government to codify provisions that ended the program. It discusses the shocking revelation by several Tribal Nations that doctors at the IHS hospitals had sterilized at least 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age around the country. …

American Informant, Ramzi Kassem

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Part of my childhood was spent in Baghdad, Iraq, during the rule of Saddam Hussein. At that time, the regime offered free and universal education and healthcare. Literacy rates in the country surpassed much of the Arabic-speaking world and, indeed, the Global South. As the celebrated Egyptian intellectual, Taha Hussein, famously put it: “Cairo writes; Beirut prints; and Baghdad reads.” Booksellers were everywhere in Baghdad. Its people read voraciously and passionately debated literature, poetry, and a range of other subjects.

But what struck me, even as a child, was the absence of sustained talk about politics in bookshops, markets, and …

The Ban And Its Enduring Bandwidth, Khaled Ali Beydoun

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Essay is a contribution the Michigan Journal of Race & Law’s special issue marking the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing War on Terror. It reflects on Executive Order 13769, widely known as the “Muslim Ban,” years after it was signed into law, as an extra-legal catalyst of state-sponsored and private Islamophobia that unfolded outside of the United States.

Law In The Shadows Of Confederate Monuments, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Hundreds of Confederate monuments stand across the United States. In recent years, leading historians have come forward to clarify that these statues were erected not just as memorials but to express white supremacist intimidation in times of racially oppressive conduct. As public support for antiracist action grows, many communities are inclined to remove public symbols that cause emotional harm, create constant security risks and dishonor the values of equality and unity. Finding a lawful path to removal is not always clear and easy. The political power brokers who choose whether monuments will stay or go often do not walk daily …

Black Lawyers Matter: Enduring Racism In American Law Firms, Vitor M. Dias

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Scholars and practitioners have extensively examined patterns of racial inequality in U.S. corporate law firms. In the corporate bar, pull factors that have long shaped legal professionals’ careers include promotions, outside job offers, and family priorities that may lead to leaving the labor force altogether. Push factors, such as discrimination, problems with management, and work-life conflict, also precipitate work transitions. Beyond corporate firms, however, an urgent question remains open to empirical scrutiny: How does race affect career moves in the contemporary American legal profession?

In this Article, I address this question drawing upon data from the first nationally representative, longitudinal …

Reparations For Slavery: A Productive Strategy?, Makau Wa Mutua

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective, Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache & Caroline Elkins, eds.

The World Of Private Terrorism Litigation, Maryam Jamshidi

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Since 9/11, private litigants have been important players in the “fight” against terrorism. Using several federal tort statutes, these plaintiffs have sued foreign states as well as other parties, like non-governmental charities, financial institutions, and social media companies, for terrorism-related activities. While these private suits are meant to address injuries suffered by plaintiffs or their loved ones, they often reinforce and reflect the U.S. government’s terrorism-related policies, including the racial and religious discrimination endemic to them. Indeed, much like the U.S. government’s criminal prosecutions for terrorism-related activities, private terrorism suits disproportionately implicate Muslim and/or Arab individuals and entities while reinforcing …

Material Support Prosecutions And Their Inherent Selectivity, Wadie E. Said

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The government’s maintenance of a list of designated foreign terrorist groups and criminalization of any meaningful interaction or transactions – whether peaceful or violent - with such groups are no longer novel concepts. Inherent in both listing these groups and prosecuting individuals for assisting them, even in trivial ways, is the government’s essentially unreviewable discretion to classify groups and proceed with any subsequent prosecutions. A summary review of the past quarter-century reveals the government’s predilection for pushing the boundaries of what it deems “material support” to terrorist groups, all the while making greater and greater use of a criminal statutory …

State Sponsored Radicalization, Sahar F. Aziz

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Where was the FBI in the months leading up to the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol in 2021? Among the many questions surrounding that historic day, this one reveals the extent to which double standards in law enforcement threaten our nation’s security. For weeks, Donald Trump’s far right-wing supporters had been publicly calling for and planning a protest in Washington, D.C. on January 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2021 presidential election results. Had they been following credible threats to domestic security, officials would have attempted to stop the Proud Boys and QAnon from breaching the Capitol …

9/11 Impacts On Muslims In Prison, Spearit

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

It is no understatement to say that September 11, 2001, is the most important date in the history of American Islam. From this day forth, Muslims would become a target for social wrath and become vilified like at no other time in American history. In one fell swoop, Muslims became the most feared and hated religious group in the country. While analysis of the impacts on Muslims tends to focus on Muslims outside of prison, it is critical to recognize that Muslims in prison were no exception to the post- 9/11 hostilities directed at Muslims. They experienced similarly heightened levels …