"Fictional Visions": Autobiographical Reflections on Re-Reading the Alchemy of Race and Rights (original) (raw)
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Islands of Empowerment: Anti-Discrimination Law and the Question of Racial Emancipation
Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, 2013
In her evocative masterpiece, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, published in 1991, Patricia Williams captured a moment in American legal thought that marked a turning point in expressions about race and power, and the implications for social equality. It contained lessons extending beyond America's unique race history, to the general social and political dynamics in liberal democracy that create conditions of privilege and exclusion. She invited us to think about the place of law in the social and institutional practices that sustain status quo hierarchies, despite proclaimed civil rights commitments to justice. She also inspired hope that the role of the lawyer could be one of mutinous agitator struggling from the inside, using the tools and skills of practice to support the causes of identifiable communities and social movements.
Justice at Trial: Dramatic Ironies of the Postracial State (Law, Culture & the Humanities 2011)
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2013
This article challenges the celebration of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court as the realization of the American dream and Court diversity in a colorblind era. It analyzes the epistemological compromises Sotomayor had to make in order to comply with what I call the prevailing legal metanarrative of postracial impartiality. Prime among these compromises was Sotomayor’s retraction of her prior critique of the disembodied and de-raced perspective this legal metanarrative presumes. I read the confirmation hearing and its aftermath as a performative ritual in which both her interrogators and Sotomayor herself restore the normative hegemony of the ideal of colorblind objectivity. I argue that this ideal functions ideologically to maintain both normative and material white and masculine privilege, precisely as state decisionmaking institutions become increasingly sexually and ethnically diverse. I draw out the dramatic ironies of the participants’ strategic disavowals – Sotomayor’s denial of the roles personal experience and empathy play in judgment, and state officials’ denial of the persistent material relevance of race in the contemporary United States. I show that trading in these rhetorics has pernicious, and paradoxical, repercussions for the national racial order.
Patricia Williams: Inflecting Critical Race Theory
Feminist Legal Studies, 1999
ABSTRACT. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has developed out of a deep dissatisfaction that many black legal scholars in the US felt with liberal civil rights discourse, a discourse premised upon the ideals of assimilation, 'colour-blindness' and integration. In addition, the emergence of ...
Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color
2017
Crystal Parikh's Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. As a literary critic with explicitly political concerns, a thinker interested in counter-hegemonic ideas but one who doesn't abandon the quest for ethical life, Parikh issues a challenge to contemporary political theorists interested in thinking through radical critique and racial justice during our reactionary times. Human rights discourse, as has well been documented and thoroughly discussed, is nothing short of complex. On the one hand, since the end of the Second World War, it has been a crucial tool for the most vulnerable people to mobilize against the horrors authoritarianism, domination, exclusion, and violence. On the other hand, it has historically been coopted for dangerous ends-just think of invocations of humanitarian intervention, US's wars for spreading democracy and peace abroad, and all the efforts associated with neoliberal privatization and financial austerity. Critics thus insist that human rights are ineffective at best, or nothing more than instruments of hegemony at worst. They are seen as powerful words on paper that only matter to the extent they are truly secured, but are usually proclaimed by states to mask their own geopolitical interests in the pursuit of free market capitalism and political order-rather than democracy. The upshot here is that human rights have very little to do with making life more livable for the poor, women, people of color, and the disabled. Parikh's work insists that such pessimism, while historically justified and intellectually understandable, relies on a narrow notion of human rights. In her view, we haven't fully appreciated the political potential in the meaning of both humanity and rights precisely because we haven't fully engaged the terrain in which these two terms have been most fruitfully explored, namely what she calls
Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, ''Black feminist theory is the theory''. The comment referred to how it is not 'just' that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, 'even' within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow 'big' insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts.
Sonia Sotomayor’s Legal Phenomenology, Racial Policing, and the Limits of Law
Polity, 2021
Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Fourth Amendment case Utah v. Strieff (2016) received a great deal of media attention, particularly for its citations to prominent Black political thinkers and its evocations of Black Lives Matter. This article interprets Justice Sotomayor's dissent as constructing an emergent legal theory that incorporates Black Lives Matter and the experiences of people of color subject to being stopped and searched into the core of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. In contrast to Clarence Thomas's abstracted majority opinion, I argue Sotomayor contests the meaning of law's relations to subjects, bringing the feeling, moving, restrained, invaded, prodded, shaped, habitual, racialized subject of the police stop into Supreme Court legal reasoning. In tension with Sotomayor's phenomenological alternative are structural and institutional constraints on the liberatory possibilities for any Supreme Court dissent, particularly one focused on racial injustice. The article argues for recognizing both the generativity of the emergent legal phenomenology and the constraints on its politics in order to grapple with the potential for legal critique to surface from what Sotomayor calls law's "cold abstractions.