Volume 26.2 (Winter 2021)
Content titles below link to full text on the MLaw Scholarship Repository.
ARTICLES
Law and Anti-Blackness
Article by Michele Goodwin
This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and hate, creating race and otherness through legislating reproduction— literal and figurative. Part II turns to the Thirteenth Amendment. It argues that the preservation of slavery endured through its transformation. That the amendment makes no room for equality further establishes the racial caste system. Part III then examines the making of racial division and caste through state legislation and local ordinances, exposing the sophistry of separate but equal. Part IV turns to the effects of these laws and how they shaped cultural norms. As demonstrated in Parts I-IV, the racial divide and caste system traumatizes its victims, while also undermining the promise of constitutional equality, civil liberties, and civil rights.
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Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons for the Gig Economy
Article by Yvette Butler
Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow economy. This Article digs into the sometimes-conflicting desires of individuals working as sex workers and gig workers to inform how gig workers can achieve the power and economic independence necessary to prevent workplace exploitation.
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In Fear of Black Revolutionary Contagion and Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, and the Genesis of Racialized Structural Violence in American Foreign Policy and Immigration Law
Article by Ciji Dodds
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.
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Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the Prison Industrial Complex
Article by Raymond Magsaysay
Recent uprisings against racial injustice, sparked by the killings of George Floyd and others, have triggered urgent calls to overhaul the U.S. criminal “justice” system. Yet Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), the fastest-growing racial group in the country, have largely been left out of these conversations. Identifying and addressing this issue, I intercalate AAPIs into powerful, contemporary critiques of the prison industrial complex, including emergent abolitionist legal scholarship. I argue that the model minority myth, an anti-Black racial project, leads to the exclusion of AAPIs in mainstream and critical studies of crime and carcerality. I begin the intervention by critiquing the lacuna that exists within Asian American Jurisprudence, specifically the erasure of criminalized AAPIs’ voices and experiences. I then demonstrate that AAPIs are caught in the carceral web of mass incarceration by highlighting the lived experiences of AAPI youth within the school-to-prison pipeline, in addition to excavating the minimal publicly available data on AAPI prison populations. Adopting multidisciplinary and multimodal methods, I identify and analyze distinct forms of racial profiling and racialized bullying that drive AAPI students out of schools and into prisons. I pay specific attention to the criminalization of various AAPI youth subgroups as whiz kids, gang members, or terrorists. In uncovering previously unexamined dimensions of the criminal system, I stress how the exclusion of AAPIs in critical discourse obscures the actual scale of the carceral state, erases complex intra- and interracial dynamics of power, marginalizes criminalized AAPIs, and concurrently reinforces anti-Blackness and other toxic ideologies. The Article reaffirms critical race, intersectional, and abolitionist analyses of race and criminalization. It also directly links Asian American Jurisprudence to on-going abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex. I conclude with a proffer of abolitionist-informed solutions to the school-to-prison pipeline such as the implementation of an Ethnic Studies curriculum. Lastly, I issue a call, particularly to AAPI communities, for fiercer and more meaningful coalition-building.
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A Fare Share: A Proposed Solution to Address the Racial Disparity in Access to Public Transportation Funding in America
Article by Michael Swistara
Black American households are up to six times less likely to own a car than white families and are four times more likely to rely on public transportation to meet their daily needs. Despite this, communities of color have seen consistent disinvestment in their transit infrastructure. Four hundred years of continued housing segregation combined with post-recession austerity policies and ongoing pro-automobile bias has exacerbated this disparity. This Note proposes a straightforward legislative tool to begin to combat this inequity. The proposed legislation would require that urbanized areas spend their public transit dollars according to the population density of the communities a given project would serve, create reporting requirements related to the racial and economic impact of transit projects, and establish a private right of action. In proposing this legislation, this Note evaluates the state of civil rights litigation as it pertains to transportation racism and draws lessons from other areas such as environmental law in order to put forth a simple solution that would have tangible effects across the country in both the short and long term.
Michigan Journal of Race & Law 