Law and hierarchies
Course description for Law 266 – Critical Race Theory at UCLA Law.
General Course Description:
Throughout American history, race has profoundly affected the lives of individuals, the growth of social institutions, the substance of culture, and the workings of our political economy. Not surprisingly, this impact has been substantially mediated through the law and legal institutions. To understand the deep interconnections between race and law, and particularly the ways in which race and law are mutually constitutive, is an extraordinary intellectual challenge. That is precisely the project of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This course will pursue this project by exploring emerging themes within CRT. Contrary to the traditional notion that racial subordination represents a deviation from the liberal legal ideal, this body of work recasts the role of law as historically central to and complicit in upholding racial hierarchy as well as hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation, among other others.
It certainly seems like an interesting (and important) subject, and worth exploring. I’m not sure exactly what “a deviation from the liberal legal ideal” means in this context. Is the liberal legal ideal the whole set of principles we are (in theory) governed by, or is it more narrowly legal than that? In other words is it wrong to think Jefferson and co really did contradict themselves by saying all men are created equal while also enshrining slavery in the Constitution?
We will focus on the origins of the critique and the contrasts between CRT and liberal and conservative analytical frameworks on race and American law and society. We will also examine some of the questions and criticisms raised about CRT, from both inside and outside the genre, as well as the impact of the work on legal and political discourses. The point of departure for the course is an exploration of race itself—what exactly is race?—and the role law plays in constructing race and alternatingly ameliorating and perpetuating racism.
CRT refers to a surge of legal scholarship, starting in the late 1980s and blossoming in the 1990s, that challenged conventional anti-discrimination thinking. According to the conventional narrative (then and probably still dominant in legal thinking about racial discrimination), discrimination on the basis of race could be effectively alleviated by expanding constitutional or statutory rights and then allowing aggrieved parties to file claims seeking remedies from governmental or private wrongdoers. In contrast, CRT scholars view racism as institutional and as baked into both American law and society. They have sharply criticized doctrines such as the intent requirement (the idea that discrimination must be intentional in order to be actionable) as overly narrow and reformist rather than structural in nature, to provide just one example.
That seems true to me. Think of redlining for instance. It doesn’t have to be explicitly racist to do its work – you just frame it as a matter of real estate values. Look here, for some reason houses in this area go for much lower prices than houses in this other area, so from an investment point of view you really ought to avoid the lower prices area, which we’ll just color red here on the map so that it will remind you to Stop. If you’re white, that is; obviously if you’re not white those considerations don’t apply.
Not intentionally racist! So then what? We just shrug and move on?
CRT as a course is part intellectual history (the story of the scholarly movement in the legal academy) and part deep exploration of the far-reaching implications of viewing race and racism in this light. We will consider criticisms of CRT, including conservative critiques, but mostly looking at challenges from within the field. We will put CRT into conversation with the most innovative social scientific formulations of racism and “race” as a concept, asking how they illuminate past and present challenges such as: reparations for past race-based injustice; social movements to combat racism; police violence against and incarceration of disproportionate numbers of people (especially men) of color; laws and policies toward migrants. The course will situate racism as operating through and in conjunction with inequality based on class, gender, national (national original and citizenship), and sexual orientation/expression.
A note at the end says the course is open only to students specializing in Critical Race Studies.
H/t twiliter
The writing is so hard to read. My eyes glaze over until they reach your commentary. You, Ophelia, are a much clearer writer than this (and indeed, than course catalogs in general).
Sorry, I forgot to include my pronouns in my internet handle.
Huh. I hadn’t really noticed the quality of the writing, I guess I was too busy trying to extract the meaning. Now that I look again I see what you mean. They have to be rather formal, I suppose, but maybe not quite as formal and jargony as that. Then again it’s law school…
This has been a key component of school funding as well. Property taxes pay for schools and are dependent on property values. So, busing to integrate schools was a recognition that even without direct intent to discriminate being proven, the effect of such policies had a racial impact.
If, in fact, the legal theory and its research is limited to legal scholarship, why the loud alarums about propagandizing our white children to hate themselves and the laws to prevent teaching CRT? It’s almost as if the conservatives want parents to think that the public schools are hotbeds of commies teaching white kids to be penitent. FIve years ago, we exercise a national “two minutes hate” on Common Core and it’s weird math. Now it’s CRT.
GW, having participated in the writing of some course catalog descriptions, I suspect that is a feature, not a bug. Why I don’t know. I do know they had no desire to make any of the courses we were describing much clearer; in fact, they appeared to prefer obfuscation.
I find it hard to take CRT seriously, simply because my first exposure to it was this garbage, as presented and mocked by Meghan Murphy.in one of her videos with Laura McNally (which I can’t find). Sure, it’s possible that there is some good CRT, but my further exposures to it have all been so incredibly jargony as to be effectively useless.
GW, your new pronouns are redundant. :P
Mike, yes, schools and property values, that’s another massive example.
Property values are how the town I grew up in kept the “wrong” sort of people out. Of course, there were some of us that were the “wrong” sort of people (in our case, not rich) that had been there long before the “right” sort of people bought up the town. We lived on a farm built by my great-grandparents, and my father wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much they wanted to rid the city of “white trash”. They ignored us most of the time (except at school) because we were so far out of town, but eventually the town built out to the very edges, eating up everything in its cancerous growth. My father finally sold…now he is no longer the “wrong” sort of person, because he has enough money to be the “right” sort…but he still presents like an old farmer, so they still don’t accept him.
The town is still largely white…they began busing in some high school boys of color my last couple of years, but only for the purpose of playing football. The boys got a better education, but they had to put up with a lot of shit. I wonder if they thought it was worth it? In the end, I decided my education was worth all the classist crap I took, but not everyone felt the same way. None of my siblings agreed, but then, they weren’t education oriented.
It’s not subtle, it’s crass and crude, but it manages to fly under the racism radar because it appears to many to be a matter of choice. “People of color don’t choose to live here!” No, but is that really a choice?
I don’t have a major problem with CRT. Is some of it flakey? Probably. That tends to happen with any social science that requires analysis and introspection. The value of it seems to be that it forces people who will be involved in the creation, prosecution and defence of laws to confront, or at least briefly consider the nature and background of those laws. Are we about to start enforcing purity of academic thought with ourselves as the arbiters? I say accept the parts that have value and argue against the parts that don’t.
From my following of #LawTwitter types, most seem to be saying that the various anti-CRT laws that are cropping up don’t even target CRT – they target general education of history as it was and are trying to create Stxepford-History in it’s place.
My interpretation of ‘liberal legal ideal’ is the idea that laws are totally blind and neutral to all – they see no race, religion, sex, sexuality, social or financial status or whatever. In practice of course, law is deeply founded in culture and politics and therefore tends to reflect to one extent or another the controlling political mind of the day maximising their wants against the strength of the opposition.
Popehat has a charachteristicly sarcastic take on the issue…
Separate, but equal?
Tsssss, no. That’s normal higher ed practice – upper level courses are for majors in the subject only, while the introductory ones and general ones are open to all. I’ve never been to law school but I assume it’s roughly the same principle – some courses everyone needs to take, and others are specialized.
Rob @ 10 –
Nailed it.
Reminds me of a moment at a CFI conference in Orlando way back in 2012, when race was being discussed and a well-meaning guy in the audience said “I don’t see race” and then gave the usual spiel that follows that, i.e. “the idea that laws are totally blind and neutral to all.” I thought “Uh oh” and then Debbie Goddard went to the mic and said something like “I’m sorry but I just can’t let that go by,” and she explained what’s wrong with it. Explained it very well.
It’s the usual liberal/radical split I suppose. On the one hand tweak some laws and all will be well, on the other hand it goes a lot deeper than that. See also: liberal v radical feminism.