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From Race to Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory
The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, especially in global market operations where immigrant female labor plays a decisive role. This Essay uses the example of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specific historical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumulation. CRT can be renewed by adopting class struggle as the means of resolving racial injustice through radical structural transformation.Vultures in Eagles’ Clothing: Conspiracy and Racial Fantasy in Populist Legal Thought
This Article has three interrelated aims. First, I will briefly describe the online world of the legal populists. My second aim in this Article is to give an account of legal populism that connects it with the American tradition of conspiracy theory and with the political consciousness of survivalism. My third and final aim in this Article is to examine, as David Williams has done in a wonderful series of articles, the relationship between the nation dreamed of by many legal populists and the one inhabited by state-sanctioned legal insiders.Si Se Puede, But Who Gets the Gravy?
In this piece, the author writes in two alternating voices: the voice of rap and the voice of standard academic discourse. The rap passages are rude, direct, even raunchy, while the prose passages are rendered in academic English. This dichotomy is intentional: Rap represents the voice of the people, the voice from below, the voice of those who live in neighborhoods filled with broken glass, an impatient, insurgent voice that bears little in common with the complex, jargon-filled sentences of most contemporary left discourse. The latter voice, in my view, has become too detached from that of our many constituents who worry about their children turning to gangs and drugs and dropping out of school, about police harassment, and where their next paycheck is coming from.Engaging the Spirit of Racial Healing Within Critical Race Theory: An Exercise in TransformativeThought
This essay posits that Critical Race Theory (CRT) must operate at both the "idealist" and "materialist" levels. Although the emphasis may be in one direction or another at particular times, both domains are continually engaged. This essay links the debate between the "materialist" and "idealist" views to another central theme within CRT, which is the need for "justice" and how the law relates to justice. This essay focuses on the contemporary debate surrounding the status of Native Hawaiians to show how "race" is being used to construct the civil and political rights of Native Hawaiian people. CRT is a jurisprudence of possibility precisely because it rejects standard liberal frameworks and precisely because it seeks to be inclusive of different groups and different experiences. As I envision the future of CRT, I want to engage a discussion about "justice" and the relationship of justice to political or racial healing. Thus, this essay seeks to identify the foundation for CRT, as the need to achieve "social justice" for groups that have suffered a history of oppression, and to engage what it means to "heal" injustice which is embedded in society at the level of both structure and consciousness. Part I of the essay explicates the scholarly debate between Professors Delgado and Johnson and offers three general themes which are useful to understand CRT as a vehicle for transformative thought in American jurisprudence. Part II probes the relationship of justice to law, drawing on contemporary work in political theory dealing with transformative political change, and sets the framework for the case study on contemporary Native Hawaiian political and legal rights, which is featured in Part III. In analyzing the case study, this essay examines the historical context within which Native Hawaiian rights are situated, and compares the analysis in the federal court cases that are constructing contemporary Native Hawaiian rights as well as the rights of non-Natives. Finally, Part IV of the essay explores the theme of racial healing and suggests how the idealist and materialist frameworks of thought within CRT might be used to effectuate the necessary change.African American Intimacy: The Racial Gap in Marriage
This essay is divided into three parts. Part I documents the extent of the racial gap in marriage. Part II uses the marriage patterns of affluent Black men in particular to speculate about how the relationships of Black men and women might be influenced by the relative numbers of men and women and the men's socioeconomic characteristics in ways that depress marriage rates. Part III connects the low rate of marriage among African Americans to the differing interracial marriage rates of Black men and women.The Sacred Way of Tibetan CRT Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach the Shadow’s Mystical Insight and Help Law Students “Know” White Structural Oppression in the Heart of the First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder to Dorothy A. Brown
Part I of this Article uses a quasi-parable, in which Dorothy Brown is a Tibetan Master who teaches law students CRT Kung Fu, the monastic fighting skills by which they will acquire the Shadow's mystical insight to "know" the heart of the first-year curriculum. Part II challenges the organizing principles and content on which Brown's Critical Race Theory purports to critically interrogate traditional legal doctrine, applying a New Age Philosophical critique as well as agency theory to crack dealing in Spanish Harlem. I use this case study to argue that crack dealers deliberately and purposefully choose extra-legal economic opportunities, even at the expense of their neighbors and community. The Conclusion demands that Race Crits think outside of the white structural oppression logical box.From Discourse to Struggle: A New Direction in Critical Race Theory
To commemorate the Michigan Journal of Race & Law's tenth anniversary, they hosted a symposium in February 2005 that marked a shift within critical race theory. Entitled "Going Back to Class?: The Reemergence of Class in Critical Race Theory," the symposium brought together speakers, students, Journal alumni, and members of the community to begin a fuller examination of the relationship between race and class.Race and Class in Political Science
As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Demrda versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes-that is, whether "the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line" or whether people are fundamentally se/f-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure. This Essay examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. It then briefly discusses the author’s own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices, in order to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. The author concludes that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.Reparations Talk in College
Review of Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery by David HorowitzThe Plight of “Nappy-Headed” Indians: The Role of Tribal Sovereignty in the Systematic Discrimination Against Black Freedmen by the Federal Government and Native American Tribes
This Note concerns the role the government has played in the exclusion of Black Freedmen from Native American nations through its implementation and interpretation of the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity ("tribal sovereignty" or "tribal immunity"). Part I discusses the background of the Freedmen within the Five Civilized Tribes and provides an overview of the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity, including its role in the controversy concerning the status of Black Indians. Part II discusses the interpretations given to the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity by United States courts and executive agencies and the effects of those interpretations on relations between Native Americans and Freedmen. Part III discusses the roles that Congress, executive agencies, and the courts must take to halt and reverse the discriminatory practices that have stripped Freedmen of their rights and privileges as members of Native American communities.
