2010 Mid-Year Meeting
Workshop on Post Racial Civil Rights Law, Politics and Legal Education: New and Old Color Lines in the Age Of Obama
June 8 – 10, 2010
New York, New York
When Du Bois wrote in 1903 that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” he was reflecting on momentous changes over the previous decades. For Du Bois, the turn of the century offered an opportunity to take stock of race, to gauge its recent past and predict its immediate future. The turn of the millennium offers us a similar backward- and forward-looking opportunity. Thus this AALS workshop on race and the law.
Entitled “Post Racial Civil Rights law, Politics and Legal Education: New and Old Color Lines in the Age of Obama” (hereafter “Post Racial Civil Rights”), the aim of this workshop, broadly framed, is to mark three significant post civil rights changes to the American racial landscape and to explore the implications of those changes for the future of racial justice advocacy, organization, litigation and legal education. As will become clear, while the three developments we have in mind are not exhaustive of the shifts in U.S. racial dynamics post Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, each raises profound questions about the direction and substantive content of civil rights reform in the decades to come.
Change I: The installation of colorblindness as both the normative backdrop against which race is publicly discussed and a formal legal technique to adjudicate civil rights cases. This installation produces racial denials (of racism), racial prohibitions (of racial consciousness) and racial elisions (of existing racial inequalities). Colorblindness has simultaneously undermined the emancipatory potential of civil rights law and made conversations about racial justice in civic and political arenas virtually impossible. At the same time, colorblindness has enabled and legitimized a discourse of cultural difference and social responsibility that now serves as the principal explanation of and justification for existing racial hierarchies.
Change II: The shift in America’s racial demographics from a majority white nation to a majority-minority nation. There are two significant features of this shift. First, no single racially-defined group represents a majority of the population; and, second, Latinos constitute the new majority-minority. By the year 2000, these patterns were firmly established in California; they now exist in numerous other states, and many of the nation’s major cities, as well.
Change III: The momentous election of Barack Obama as the first Black President of the United States. When Obama announced his decision to run for the United States presidency, few people thought he would win the democratic nomination, let alone the White House. But win the White House is precisely what he did, changing the face of American politics in the process and facilitating the introduction of a new term in our ever-shifting racial vocabulary: post racialism. Exactly what this term will come to mean is anybody’s guess. What is clear is that post racialism has already begun to operate as “replacement labor” for the ideological work that colorblindness has traditionally performed.
Organized over three days, the Post Racial Civil Rights Workshop will examine what the foregoing developments portend for civil rights legal practice, education and political reform. An informal reception opens the workshop on the evening of Tuesday, June 8. The substantive sessions will begin on Wednesday, June 9, with a plenary focused the role law plays in reproducing inequality, even and perhaps especially when no formal “racial classifications” are involved. Entitled “The Legal (Re)production of Inequality,” the plenary will demonstrate some of the distinctive mechanisms through which law reproduces racial inequality in areas including: criminal justice, healthcare, housing, education, employment, immigration, and constitutional law. Small group informal breakout sessions will follow the plenary, but remain in the plenary room. Rather, the plenary attendees will simply form small groups based on where they are seated and engage the members of their group for 30 minutes around the themes the plenary presented. Group participants will then have the opportunity to draw on their group discussions to direct questions at the plenary speakers.
Lunch then follows and will feature a keynote presentation. A second plenary will launch the afternoon sessions, this one devoted to “New Paradigms of Racialization.” As mentioned above, the United States has shifted from a majority white nation to a nation within which (1) no single racial group constitutes a racial majority, (2) people of color outnumber whites, and (3) Latinos are the new minority majority. This plenary panel will explore whether these demographic changes—and social response to them—reflect new paradigms of racialization. How should we now count race? What are the frames in which we now talk about race? And what are the intersectional implications of these shifts in demographics and discourse? How do they affect our conception of whiteness? Do they have implications for relations of intimacy—shaping perceptions about childbearing and child care, or the social expression of sexuality? How do these new forms of racialization shape claims about citizenship and security, immigration and sovereignty? Staying with this theme, the second afternoon session will feature a choice among several concurrent sessions, including sessions on the census, immigration and profiling, sovereignty, race and dependency and race, family and sexuality.
The second day of the workshop, Thursday, June 9, will open with the plenary, “Race Across the Curriculum and Law School: Race Law 101 and Beyond.” This plenary will focus on race, legal education and law school environment. Senior, mid-level and junior professors will discuss not only the substantive content on the basic race law course, but also how if, at all, that course does or should differ from a course in critical race theory. The panelists will also consider whether identity specific courses, such as Latinos and the Law and Asian American Jurisprudence, enhance or diminish a multiracial approach to civil rights reform. Finally, because race is endogenous (and not just exogenous) to legal environments, the plenary will consider some of the ways in which—outside of the classroom—race shapes and is itself shaped by the institutional culture and life of law schools. To permit further discussion of these issues, the plenary will be followed by small group breakout sessions that, in addition to continuing the discussion of law school environment and race-specific courses, will examine how to incorporate race into non-traditional race law classes, such as tax and the basic first year curriculum.
Lunch then follows with a keynote presentation on the Obama Administration and Civil Rights. The afternoon sessions will turn to solutions. The discussion will begin with the plenary, “Interventions: The Possibilities and Limitations of Law.” As the title suggests, this plenary will examine whether law remains a productive vehicle with which to achieve racial reform. From antidiscrimination law to immigration law to human rights to housing and criminal justice reforms, the panelists will explore the possibilities and limitations of law—working alongside large and small scale political organizing—to effectuate progressive racial change.
The day ends with another plenary, this one structured in the form of a roundtable to maximize audience participation. Entitled, “The Future of Race, Law and Civil Rights: Asking and Answering the Hard Questions,” this plenary will press the panelists to consider some of the most difficult and controversial questions about the future of race, law and civil rights. Some of the questions will explicitly draw from, though they will not be exhausted by, the themes around which the preceding plenaries are organized. Is Obama’s presidency likely to be more symbolic than substantive? Are there progressive terms upon which assimilationist projects can be articulated? Should whiteness be more explicitly engaged in our public and political discourses about race? How we should we theorize the notion of a black/white binary? Has civil rights advocacy failed meaningfully to engage class? How, if at all, should arguments based on hierarchies of oppression figure in civil rights advocacy? To what extent should our racial engagements be more globally-centered? What is role of international law in domestic civil rights reform? These are some of the questions this plenary will take up.
Who Should Attend?
This workshop has been planned for (1) anyone interested in post civil rights changes to the American racial landscape and the implications of those changes for the future of racial justice advocacy, organization, litigation and legal education, (2) scholars and teachers in the field of race and the law and anti-discrimination law, including but not limited to, those who write about or teach courses in constitutional law, employment discrimination, women and the law, sexual orientation and the law and feminist jurisprudence, and (3) law professors who teach courses that are not explicitly marked in terms of race and are interested in developing new and exciting ways to incorporate race into their courses.
~Planning Committee for 2010 Mid Year Meeting
Workshop on Post Racial Civil Rights
Devon Wayne Carbado, University of California, Los Angeles, Chair
Ian F. Haney Lopez, University of California, Berkeley
Audrey McFarlane, University of Baltimore
Robert O. Porter, Syracuse University
Reva B. Siegel, Yale Law School
Stephanie M. Wildman, Santa Clara University
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