Migration, Development, and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women

Part I of this Essay provides an overview of the rural-to-urban migration phenomenon, a trend the author calls the urban juggernaut. This Part includes a discussion of forces compelling the migration, and it also considers consequences for those who are left behind when their family members and neighbors migrate to cities. Part II explores women\u27s roles in food production in the developing world, and it considers the extent to which international development efforts encourage or entail urbanization. Part III attends to the potential of human rights for this population, analyzing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which, in Article 14, enumerates particular rights for rural women. This Part further considers how four countries-China, Ghana, India, and the Republic of South Africa-have responded to their Article 14 commitments. Part IV concludes with thoughts on how law and legal institutions-including those related to development efforts-might best serve rural women. It begins also to consider how the role of law might differ in rural contexts. Part V, as postscript, contemplates the consequences of letting migration\u27s urban juggernaut run its course

The Geography of the Class Culture Wars

As suggested by the title of her new book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan Williams takes class seriously. Class matters, Williams argues, because “socially conscious progressives” need political allies to achieve progress with their agenda for work-family reform. Williams calls us not only to think about class and recognize it as a significant axis of stratification and (dis)advantage, but also to treat the working class with respect and dignity. Emblematic of Williams’s argument is her challenge to us to “[d]iscard[] Marxian analyses from 30,000 feet” and “come down to learn enough about working-class life to end decades of casual insults.” In other words, be nice and play fair. It’s a tried-and-true way to win friends and influence people. In this Essay, I seek to enhance Williams’s powerful and pathbreaking discussion of the white working class in three ways. Part I brings geography explicitly into consideration by arguing that the culture wars—which I believe Williams aligns correctly along a broad and fuzzy line between the working class and the professional-managerial class—similarly align along the rural–urban axis. Just as liberal elites shun and ridicule the white working class, they similarly express disdain for rural and small-town residents. Indeed, among denizens of the largest cities and “coastal elites,” rural Americans have become a proxy for the working class—the uncouth, the uncultured, and—yes—the illiberal. I contend that social progressives reserve their greatest contempt—and increasingly also their ire—for whites in rural America, the vast majority of whom are working class. Based on this argument that the opposing sides in the class culture wars are now represented, broadly speaking, by the rural and the urban, I take up three other issues. First, in Part II, I disrupt Williams’s broad-brush class dichotomy—“professional-managerial” and “working class”—by introducing other classes and subclasses that are particularly relevant in rural contexts. Specifically, I show how Williams’s implicitly metropolitan class taxonomy parallels a similar divide in nonmetropolitan communities, and I discuss the role of morality as a basis for differentiation among factions of the white working class in both types of settings. Then, in Part III, I argue that cultural and political disdain for rural folks prevents law and policy-makers from seeing and addressing the distinct challenges facing the rural citizenry—including those associated with work-life security. I conclude in Part IV with thoughts on what might provide common ground between the professional-managerial class and the white working class—ground that could provide a bridge of understanding that would permit political détente and, ultimately, cooperation

Spatial Inequality as Constitutional Infirmity: Equal Protection, Child Poverty and Place

Spatial Inequality as Constitutional Infirmit

The Geography of the Class Culture Wars

As suggested by the title of her new book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan Williams takes class seriously. Class matters, Williams argues, because “socially conscious progressives” need political allies to achieve progress with their agenda for work-family reform. Williams calls us not only to think about class and recognize it as a significant axis of stratification and (dis)advantage, but also to treat the working class with respect and dignity. Emblematic of Williams’s argument is her challenge to us to “[d]iscard[] Marxian analyses from 30,000 feet” and “come down to learn enough about working-class life to end decades of casual insults.” In other words, be nice and play fair. It’s a tried-and-true way to win friends and influence people. In this Essay, I seek to enhance Williams’s powerful and pathbreaking discussion of the white working class in three ways. Part I brings geography explicitly into consideration by arguing that the culture wars—which I believe Williams aligns correctly along a broad and fuzzy line between the working class and the professional-managerial class—similarly align along the rural–urban axis. Just as liberal elites shun and ridicule the white working class, they similarly express disdain for rural and small-town residents. Indeed, among denizens of the largest cities and “coastal elites,” rural Americans have become a proxy for the working class—the uncouth, the uncultured, and—yes—the illiberal. I contend that social progressives reserve their greatest contempt—and increasingly also their ire—for whites in rural America, the vast majority of whom are working class. Based on this argument that the opposing sides in the class culture wars are now represented, broadly speaking, by the rural and the urban, I take up three other issues. First, in Part II, I disrupt Williams’s broad-brush class dichotomy—“professional-managerial” and “working class”—by introducing other classes and subclasses that are particularly relevant in rural contexts. Specifically, I show how Williams’s implicitly metropolitan class taxonomy parallels a similar divide in nonmetropolitan communities, and I discuss the role of morality as a basis for differentiation among factions of the white working class in both types of settings. Then, in Part III, I argue that cultural and political disdain for rural folks prevents law and policy-makers from seeing and addressing the distinct challenges facing the rural citizenry—including those associated with work-life security. I conclude in Part IV with thoughts on what might provide common ground between the professional-managerial class and the white working class—ground that could provide a bridge of understanding that would permit political détente and, ultimately, cooperation

Who’s Afraid of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting, and Disdain (And Toward a Richer Conception of Diversity)

This Article describes and theorizes the legal academy’s denial of both class disadvantage and class migration, with particular attention to how those phenomena are manifest in relation to white faculty. The Article observes that a general disdain for poor and working-class whites evolves into the denial and distancing of class migrants, those who move into the professoriate from lower socioeconomic stations (“SES”). Further, the academy simultaneously discredits and disciplines these class migrants when they run afoul of narrow norms regarding credentials, scholarship, and culture. The author employs storytelling as methodology, drawing on her own experiences as a white class migrant to illustrate some of these phenomena. This Article, one in a series that takes up poor whites and the white working class as critical race projects, makes several theoretical contributions. First, it theorizes why white poverty, the white working class, and thus the phenomenon of white class migration, are so taboo among legal scholars. Closely related to this taboo are the reasons white class migrants are not viewed and valued as representing the diversity held so dear by the professoriate. Among other things, the Article begins the work of thinking about the phenomenon of white class migration as one that is as much about race as about class. It does so, however, in ways that go beyond Critical Race Theory’s (“CRT”) typical engagement with whiteness as monolithic abstraction. The Article suggests that the persistent race-vs.-class debate— regarding whether race or class is a bigger culprit in relation to various social problems and injustices—has proved an attractive distraction that has deterred robust scholarly engagement with many potent intersections of race with class, including that between white-skin privilege and socioeconomic disadvantage. Indeed, the academy is deterred from taking up just this intersection of whiteness with socioeconomic disadvantage for fear that doing so will detract from the very grave problems of racial disadvantage and racial discrimination experienced by nonwhites. Yet when we ignore class-based disadvantage— as when we ignore race-based disadvantage—we avoid an uncomfortable but critical conversation about authentic meritocracy. Ignoring the intersection of class disadvantage with white privilege also permits us to avoid confronting long-standing, intra-racial elite biases against poor and working-class whites. The second theoretical contribution of the Article—written for a collection about the persistence of gender discrimination in the academy—regards the ways in which gender mediates the white class migration experience in the context of legal academia. In particular, the author discusses three junctures when the intersection of gender and class have particular implications for academic careers. These are mentoring, physical appearance, and life partnerships. Finally, the author identifies several reasons why the legal academy needs the distinctive perspectives of class migrants. First, class migrants have become rarer among the professoriate in recent years because of heightened elitism in law faculty hiring during an era when low-income students are in shorter supply than ever in the prestigious colleges, universities, and law schools that bestow the requisite credentials. Second, the wider trend of diminishing upward mobility not only weighs on our national psyche, it has serious implications for our nation’s economic well-being due to this failure to optimize raw human capital of all colors. This situation renders the perspectives and insights of all class migrants more valuable than ever because they have first-hand experience with the upward mobility journey that we should be fostering, and which we support in principle. Furthermore, class migrants can serve as role models and mentors for students in the midst of that process. Third, the author argues that poor and working-class whites are both key stakeholders and key informants in our quest for racial progress, although their perspectives are seldom heard in the academy. We rarely talk about low-SES whites; we talk to them even less frequently. One way to begin to draw in those particular white perspectives is through the inclusion of class migrants in the law professoriate. That inclusion should also endow future generations of lawyers with a greater class consciousness that will serve the interests of all races and ethnicities in wider society. In faculty composition as in myriad other contexts, the author implores us to move beyond the impasse of thinking we must address only racial disadvantage or only class disadvantage and to grapple with both at their myriad intersections

Migration, Development, and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women

Part I of this Essay provides an overview of the rural-to-urban migration phenomenon, a trend the author calls the urban juggernaut. This Part includes a discussion of forces compelling the migration, and it also considers consequences for those who are left behind when their family members and neighbors migrate to cities. Part II explores women\u27s roles in food production in the developing world, and it considers the extent to which international development efforts encourage or entail urbanization. Part III attends to the potential of human rights for this population, analyzing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which, in Article 14, enumerates particular rights for rural women. This Part further considers how four countries-China, Ghana, India, and the Republic of South Africa-have responded to their Article 14 commitments. Part IV concludes with thoughts on how law and legal institutions-including those related to development efforts-might best serve rural women. It begins also to consider how the role of law might differ in rural contexts. Part V, as postscript, contemplates the consequences of letting migration\u27s urban juggernaut run its course