Taking the Knee No More: Police Accountability and the Structure of Racism

From before the birth of the republic to the present day, police brutality has represented a signature injustice of state authority, especially against African Americans. Defining that injustice is the lack of accountability for official misconduct. The rule of law has systematically failed to deter lawbreaking by its law enforcement departments. This Article explores the various legal and institutional means by which accountability should be imposed and demonstrates the design elements of structured immunity. Using Critical Race Theory and traditional civil rights law notions of how structural racism operates, this Article argues that transformative change can only come about through recognition that the current system achieves the objectives for which it was designed. These objectives must change

\u3ci\u3eTrapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality, and Law\u3c/i\u3e

Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse, and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological, and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, this Article argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally sanctioned environments of isolated, segregated poverty. The sources of psychological trauma may be largely environmental, but the traumatic environments themselves are caused by spatial inequality. This Article sets forth a theory of structural inequality that demonstrates the importance of place-based differences in institutional functioning and the role of such disparities in producing the neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral outcomes comprehensively described in the literature from those disciplines (including the results of an original study of Newark, New Jersey school children). International analogies show how similarly human beings process traumatic events. This alternative legal analysis of child trauma compels a different remedial approach to both intervention and prevention. It argues that interventions like special education reform are necessary but problematic because they risk pathologizing the African American poor and exhausting institutional capacity. Instead, it provides a framework for prevention focused upon increasing mobility options and reforming local institutions

Katrina’s Window: Localism, Re-segregation and Equitable Regionalism

The worst national disaster in United States history also showcased the dire consequences of localism as the cultural and legal successor to de jure segregation. Long before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, New Orleans’ status as an exceptional city had been lost to Americanizing trends. Its resistance to the conventional racial binary was overcome after Reconstruction; its unique densities and accommodation of the physical landscape were transformed into sprawling divisions by technology and suburbanization. From the Brown decision forward, New Orleans and the metropolitan area around it developed much like the rest of the nation. Localist tendencies combined with legal protections for local autonomy—as exemplified and supported by several key decisions of the Burger Court—to re-segregate the region. A decade before Katrina, New Orleans, like most central cities, was financially incapable of deconcentrating neighborhoods of persistent poverty and politically powerless to wrest a more equitable sharing of state fiscal resources and burdens from its neighboring parishes. Part II examines the history of New Orleans as a city central to American concepts of racialized space, from slavery to Katrina. Part III argues that localism became the jurisprudential edifice that supplanted de jure segregation there and elsewhere after Brown. Its underlying notions of economic rationalism and colorblind innocence have since been reinforced by decentalization, consumption, political fragmentation and black middle-class antipathy for integration to re-segregate metropolitan America. Part IV argues that this analytic focus on the role of “legal localism” in re-segregating America’s metropolitan regions compels its own remedial principle: equitable regionalism. Under this principle of local government law reform, political coalitions may be possible in joining the interests of antipoverty, fair housing and community development advocates with their counterparts in smartgrowth, environmental preservation and antisprawl organizations. Urban neighborhoods chronically destabilized by poverty need localism’s emphasis on participation through planning devices; similar devices may help to effectuate equitable regional goals. The current antimajoritarian rules have weakened both cities and a great many suburbs, suggesting ultimately that what benefits the isolated urban poor may also improve the welfare of the suburban middle class

\u3ci\u3eTrapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality, and Law\u3c/i\u3e

Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse, and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological, and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, this Article argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally sanctioned environments of isolated, segregated poverty. The sources of psychological trauma may be largely environmental, but the traumatic environments themselves are caused by spatial inequality. This Article sets forth a theory of structural inequality that demonstrates the importance of place-based differences in institutional functioning and the role of such disparities in producing the neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral outcomes comprehensively described in the literature from those disciplines (including the results of an original study of Newark, New Jersey school children). International analogies show how similarly human beings process traumatic events. This alternative legal analysis of child trauma compels a different remedial approach to both intervention and prevention. It argues that interventions like special education reform are necessary but problematic because they risk pathologizing the African American poor and exhausting institutional capacity. Instead, it provides a framework for prevention focused upon increasing mobility options and reforming local institutions