Institutional Racism

Much of the activity in the 1960s revolving about civil rights reflected the belief that racism was a personal flaw which could be corrected by the proper adjustment of federal laws to give substance to the promises of citizenship. George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor all personified racism with their determined efforts to prevent blacks from achieving full citizenship rights and their excesses spurred them to action when it was believed that with the power of the federal government curbing the activities of a few die-hard racists discrimination would finally be conquered. The emphasis on personal attitudes obscured the deeply ingrained institutional views of race which had systematically discriminated against minority groups for decades. Correcting individual patterns of behavior, people believed, would also cure institutional practices since it was apparent to everyone that institutions were ultimately composed of people

Our Brother\u27s Keeper: The Indian in White America

Our Brother\u27s Keeper purports to be the story of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is not. It is the story of the Bureau as the Citizen\u27s Advocate Center wishes you to see it. It is a series of unrelated incidents and events that make a gruesome tale when strung together on a theory-of-colonialistoppression clothesline. Yet the deliberate structuring of these incidents-so as to support an abstract interpretation of a government agency and its role in the lives of its constituent service group-pre-empts the contemporary Indian dilemma as surely as if every Indian were struck dumb and unable to speak at all. The upshot of the report is that whit3w are very, very bad and Indians are very, very helpless and that Something should be done; but the authors would not presume to offer any suggestions. It is just as well that Cahn and company do not, since if their solution were as bizarre as their presentation, it would truly be the most tragic thing ever to happen to Indian people

Racial and Ethnic Studies, Political Science and Mid-Wifery

One of the major fallacies of Western civilization, according to Alfred North Whitehead,\u27 was the propensity of Western thinkers to assume that ideas generated within their intellectual landscape were indicative of reality itself. Although some phases of Western science, notably physics and philosophy, have transcended their parochial origins, aspects of the old medieval synthesis still remain in the Western worldview. The gradual fragmentation of the old categories of natural history and theology into the isolated sciences and disciplines of today has produced a myriad of separate bodies of knowledge complete with their professional priesthoods and has allowed considerable slippage in the ability of the Western scientific paradigm to generate adequate explanations for the multitude of problems we face as a society

Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations

Federal Indian law... is a loosely related collection of past and present acts of Congress, treaties and agreements, executive orders, administrative rulings, and judicial opinions, connected only by the fact that law in some form has been applied haphazardly to American Indians over the course of several centuries.... Indians in their tribal relation and Indian tribes in their relation to the federal government hang suspended in a legal wonderland. In this book, two prominent scholars of American Indian law and politics undertake a full historical examination of the relationship between Indians and the United States Constitution that explains the present state of confusion and inconsistent application in U.S. Indian law. The authors examine all sections of the Constitution that explicitly and implicitly apply to Indians and discuss how they have been interpreted and applied from the early republic up to the present. They convincingly argue that the Constitution does not provide any legal rights for American Indians and that the treaty-making process should govern relations between Indian nations and the federal government.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1331/thumbnail.jp

[Introduction to] The Legal Universe: Observations on the Foundations of American Law

According to Deloria and Wilkins, Whenever American minorities have raised voices of protest, they have been admonished to work within the legal system that seek its abolition. This essential work examines the historical evolution of the legal rights of various minority groups and the relationship between these rights and the philosophical intent of the American founders.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1336/thumbnail.jp