Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality

I am pleased to be a part of this symposium honoring Catharine MacKinnon\u27s groundbreaking work as a feminist theorist, legal advocate, and global activist. This invitation not only presents the opportunity to examine the interface between dominance theory and intersectionality, but also the occasion to delve further into the vexed rhetorical politics surrounding feminism and antiracism. By now the fact that there has been a contested relationship between antiracism and feminism is almost axiomatic.1 Yet as with most things that have become matters of common knowledge, there is a risk that generalizations can metastasize into hardened conclusions that obscure rather than illuminate important dynamics among people, theories, and movements

From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and Social Control

The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional settings to manufacture social punishment and human suffering. Beyond addressing the convergences between private and public power that constitute the intersectional dimensions of social control, this Article addresses political failures within the antiracism and antiviolence movements that may contribute to the legitimacy of the contemporary punishment culture, both ideologically and materially

Framing Affirmative Action

With the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (“MCRI”), Michigan joins California and Washington to constitute the new postaffirmative action frontier. For proponents such as Ward Connerly, affirmative action is on the edge of extinction. Connerly plans to carry his campaign against what he calls “racial preferences” to eight states in 2008, scoring a decisive Super-Tuesday repudiation of a social policy that he portrays as the contemporary face of racial discrimination. On the other side of the issue, proponents of affirmative action are struggling to regroup, fearful that the confluence of lukewarm support among Democratic allies, messy presidential politics and a menacing Supreme Court may spell the end of affirmative action as we know it. Of course predictions of the untimely departure of affirmative action have been wrong before. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s surprising decision in Grutter v. Bollinger caught runaway circuit judges and trigger happy pundits celebrating the demise of affirmative action a little too soon

This Is Not a Drill: The War Against Antiracist Teaching in America

On January 5, 2022, Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw received the 2021 Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Legal Profession from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). In this modified acceptance speech delivered at the 2022 AALS Awards Ceremony, she reflects on the path that brought her to this moment and the crisis over antiracist and social justice education that is unfolding today. Arguing that the legal academy bears a collective responsibility to fight back against the silencing of antiracist frameworks, she calls on legal educational institutions to confront their historical agnosticism toward racial subordination and to defend the freedom to teach and learn Critical Race Theory against the concerted efforts to undo its legacy

Keeping Up with Jim Jones: Pioneer, Taskmaster, Architect, Trailblazer

It is a special honor to have this opportunity to celebrate Professor Jim Jones\u27s pivotal role in integrating the ranks of the law professoriat. Jim Jones was of course not the only one who hoped that the number of minority law professors would swell as the number of law graduates increased, but unlike those who simply watched and waited, Jim Jones decided to actually do something about the infamous pool problem in legal education. Through his innovation, mentoring, and dogged advocacy, Jim Jones put action to passion, quietly, deliberately, and diligently creating a pipeline of minority law teachers. I know that, at least for me, and most likely for every other Hastie Fellow, were it not for Jim Jones, we would not have the careers that we do. This Tribute provides us all with the opportunity not only to express profound gratitude to Professor Jones, but to consider the implications of his visionary leadership in the context of the contemporary challenges we now face

Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward

This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of postracialism. The Article will explore two central inquiries. This first query attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The Article hypothesizes that legal discourse presented a particularly legible template from which to demystify the role of reason and the rule of law in upholding the racial order. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT\u27s trajectory in light of today\u27s post-racial milieu. The Article posits that CRT emerged between the pillars of liberal racial reform and Critical Legal Studies and that other conditions of its possibility included the temporal, institutional, and ideological nature of race discourse in the mid-eighties. Turning to the contemporary period, the Article posits that the post-racial turn presents conditions that are both parallel to and distinct from those that prevailed during CRTs formative years, and that the challenge of a contemporary CRT is to synthesize a transdisciplinary critique and counter-narrative to the post-racial settlement

Race, Gender, and Sexual Harassment

I would like to thank Anita Hill and express my deep respect to her for having the courage to shatter the silence on sexual harassment. I am certain that I speak for millions of women in saying that I have been inspired and renewed by her strength and integrity. I have looked forward to addressing you tonight on a critical issue at this very important juncture in our political history. Sexual harassment has captured our attention over the last several weeks and has of course galvanized women in a way that scarcely could have been imagined only a few short months ago. The issue I want to address tonight, however, is at once narrower and broader than sexual harassment. Focusing on the intersections of race and gender, I want to highlight the racial dimensions of sexual harassment of African-American women

Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasize the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices and possibilities available to an oppressed group such as Blacks. The Critics, she suggests, ignore the singular power of racism as a hegemonic force in American society. Blacks have been created as a subordinated other, and formal reform has merely repackaged racism. Antidiscrimination law, she argues, has largely succeeded in eliminating the symbolic manifestations of racial oppression, but has allowed the perpetuation of material subordination of Blacks. Professor Crenshaw concludes by demonstrating the importance of exposing the racist nature of ostensibly neutral norms, and of devising strategies for change that include the pragmatic use of legal rights

Reel Time/Real Justice

Like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a few months before, the Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who restrained him and the subsequent civil unrest in Los Angeles flashed Race across the national consciousness and the gaze of American culture momentarily froze there. Pieces of everyday racial dynamics briefly seemed clear, then faded from view, replaced by presidential politics and natural disasters. This Essay examines in more depth what was exposed during the momentary national focus on Rodney King. Two main events – the acquittal of the police officers who beat King and the civil unrest in Los Angeles following the verdict – serve as starting points for an analysis of the ideological and symbolic intertwining of race and power in American culture. This Essay explicates the \u27outlines of a critical race theory, focusing not solely on the Rodney King incident, but considering more broadly how racial power generally is produced, mediated and legitimated – an approach that seeks to connect developments in diverse arenas in which race and power are contested

The Court\u27s Denial of Racial Societal Debt

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate