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Race and Human Trafficking
By: Shelly Feldman, Associate Editor, Vol. 27 One of the most pressing global challenges is human trafficking. Human trafficking is defined as “a crime whereby traffickers exploit and profit at the expense of adults and children by compelling them to perform labor or commercial sex.”[i] Former President of…
The MMIP Crisis: We Must Not Be Silent[1]
November is Native American Heritage Month (also known as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month). In honor of this American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, I will be writing about an issue affecting Native communities across the country: the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples (MMIP). This is a crisis “centuries in the making that will take a focused effort and time” to unravel. Recent legislation and policy initiatives to address the crisis mark a turning point in terms of the government’s priority in tackling the crisis.The Ban and its Enduring Bandwidth
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
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 in their shadows. In recent years, eight Southern state legislatures enacted monument preservation legislation designed to thwart local removal efforts. These laws have prompted bitter conflicts, sometimes leading angry citizens to topple massive stone or bronze monuments themselves. The challenges present fertile ground for innovative lawyering. Creative applications of state property, nuisance and contract laws have led to removals notwithstanding the prohibitions of state preservation laws. When state law blocks removal or contextualization, communities may look to federal law as a source for taking antiracist action. First Amendment doctrine governing expressive speech has not provided a fruitful solution. Despite the expressive nature of Confederate monuments, efforts to weaponize the First Amendment by both sides of the monument debate have failed, largely due to the government speech doctrine. Given the age and quality of most monuments, copyright law is also not likely to provide an effective federal claim. The Federal Civil Rights Act offers an untapped but promising foundation for resolving these controversies. Title VI and Title VII could be used to challenge monuments that contribute to a hostile work or educational environment. Federal civil rights claims would supersede state legislation enacted to prevent removal of racially hostile symbols. Even when state law does not present removal barriers, communities who seek to take meaningful anti-racist action could ground their initiatives in the Civil Rights Act’s core value of equality. For all who are confronting this issue, this Article seeks to provide a legal and strategic framework for acknowledging history while reclaiming the symbolic heart of our public spaces and a means to assure that the symbols we elevate affirm shared contemporary values.State Sponsored Radicalization
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 perimeter. Yet when the day came, the mob of pro-Trump extremists seemed to catch law enforcement by surprise. They seized the Capitol, ransacked congress members’ offices, and openly posted photos of their destruction and their weapons online. In the preceding two decades, the U.S. government has poured money into a behemoth national security apparatus. The FBI’s annual budget ballooned from $3 billion in 1999 to nearly $10 billion today. Much of this 300% increase went to countering terrorism with a mandate to surveil, investigate, and prosecute “homegrown terrorists.” In no uncertain terms, the directive was for the FBI to target Muslim communities.
Legal Deserts: Race & Rural America
By Zachery NewtonAssociate Editor, Vol. 26 Despite being the home of 20% of Americans, only an estimated 2% of practicing attorneys live in rural America.[1] It is not uncommon for rural counties to have few, sometimes zero, practicing lawyers. The shortage in these “legal deserts” is not for a…
Race and Blackness in Brazil
By: Thomas DesoutterAssociate Editor, Vol. 26 Brazil is a nation of 210 million people, sixty percent of whom are Black or multiracial. Many of the country’s most celebrated cultural traditions are rooted in the practices of Brazil’s enslaved people and their descendants. The most famous Brazilian of all time, the…The Soul Savers: A 21st Century Homage to Derrick Bell’s Space Traders or Should Black People Leave America?
Note: Narrative storytelling is a staple of legal jurisprudence. The Case of the Speluncean Explorers by Lon Fuller and The Space Traders by Derrick Bell are two of the most well-known and celebrated legal stories. The Soul Savers parable that follows pays tribute to Professor Bell’s prescient, apocalyptic racial tale. Professor Bell, a founding member of Critical Race Theory, wrote The Space Traders to instigate discussions about America’s deeply rooted entanglements with race and racism. The Soul Savers is offered as an attempt to follow in Professor Bell’s narrative footsteps by raising and pondering new and old frameworks about the rule of law and racial progress. The year 2020 marks the thirty-year anniversary of Bell’s initial iteration of the Space Traders tale.#ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education
Generation Z, with a birth year between 1995 and 2010, is the most diverse generational cohort in U.S. history and is the largest segment of our population. Gen Zers hold progressive views on social issues and expect diversity and minority representation where they live, work, and learn. American law schools, however, are not known for their diversity, or for being inclusive environments representative of the world around us. This culture of exclusion has led to an unequal legal profession and academy, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-white. As Gen Zers bring their demands for inclusion, and for a legal education that will prepare them to tackle social justice issues head on, they will encounter an entirely different culture—one that is completely at odds with their expectations. This paper adds depth and perspective to the existing literature on Generation Z in legal education by focusing on their social needs and expectations, recognizing them as critical drivers of legal education and reform. To provide Gen Z students with a legal education that will enable them to make a difference for others—a need deeply connected to their motivators and beliefs—law school culture must shift. Reimagining, reconstituting, and reconfiguring legal education to create a culture of inclusion and activism will be essential and necessary. Engaging in this work “for the culture” means getting serious about diversifying our profession by abandoning exclusionary hiring metrics, embedding social justice throughout the law school curriculum, and adopting institutional accountability measures to ensure that these goals are met. Gen Zers are accustomed to opposing institutions that are rooted in inequality; law schools can neither afford, nor ignore the opposition any longer. We must begin reimagining legal education now—and do it, for the culture.In Fear of Black Revolutionary Contagion and Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, and the Genesis of Racialized Structural Violence in American Foreign Policy and Immigration Law
This article investigates the power relation between the political anatomy of the Black soul and non-somatic expressions of white supremacy-based violence. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment in conjunction with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence, I posit that the exercise of state-sanctioned discipline and punishment in furtherance of white supremacy constitutes racialized structural violence. Thus, this article contributes to the current public discourse concerning the role white supremacy plays in America by establishing a new construct that can be used to dissect the nature of racial oppression. Furthermore, this article analyzes the genesis and construction of racialized structural violence in American foreign policy and immigration law using America’s response to the Haitian Revolution as a case study. When combined, akin to discipline, American foreign policy and immigration law is a white supremacy-oriented, complex bundle of power technologies designed to evoke docility from Black and Brown nations. Both allow America to engage in dissociative white supremacy. Over time, America’s “right” and power to discipline and punish Black and Brown nations has been normalized as a rational function of our global society.