Slavery as Immigration?

This article employs a reconsideration of the historical underpinnings of today’s immigration system, including the relevant law and policy regulating the transportation of enslaved people as part of the slavery syste

Toward an Integral Critical Approach to Thinking, Talking, Writing, and Teaching About Race

A response and critizism of Are Law Schools Racist?: A Talk with Richard Delgad

Legal Education as Contemplative Inquiry: An Integrative Approach to Legal Education, Law Practice, and the Substance of the Law We Make

In this paper, the author describes the advent and increasing prevalence of contemplative pedagogy within legal education and discusses some of the ways that contemplative approaches to legal education and law practice are infusing the legal system with a new consciousness, one that may amount to a new birth of freedom by and through law, and through reimagining education—for lawyers, and for us all

Competing Narratives, Competing Jurisprudences: Are Law Schools Racist? and the Case for an Integral Critical Approach to Thinking, Talking, Writing, and Teaching About Race

REJOINDER TO Dan Subotnik\u27s Are Law Schools Racist?- Part I

The inner work of racial justice: healing ourselves and transforming our communities through mindfulness

An essential mindfulness-based approach to increase our mental and emotional capacity to heal from injustices done against us Law professor and mindfulness practitioner Rhonda Magee shows that the work of racial justice begins with ourselves. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of our own tribe, and to blame others. The practice of mindfulness-paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way-increases our emotional resilience, giving us the space to become less reactive and to choose how we respond to injustice. For victims of injustice, mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. Magee shows us how to slow down and reflect on microaggressions-to hold them with some objectivity and distance-rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. She helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division. It is only by healing from the injustices done against us and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Magee\u27s hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.https://repository.usfca.edu/faculty_books_2019/1014/thumbnail.jp

The Way of ColorInsight: Understanding Race and Law Effectively Through Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices

Most of us know that, despite the counsel of the current Supreme Court, colorblindness does not comport with our cognitive experience of the real world. Thus legal scholars, backed by cognitive scientists, have called for a move from colorblindness to color insight -- defined as an understanding of race and its pervasive operation in our lives and in the law. This Article is the first to explore the role of research-grounded mindfulness-based contemplative practices in enhancing what may be called Colorinsight, and to suggest specific practices that assist in its development not only of personal capacity to deal more effectively with race, but, more importantly, of the tools necessary for effective collaborative social change in the 21st century. The Article breaks new ground in at least three important ways: (1) it furthers efforts to push beyond the important but limited cognitive turn in understanding racism and discrimination and deepens understanding not only their emotional but relational and systemic aspects; (2) it mines a rich body of research on mindfulness as a means of supporting cross-racial interactions and systemic change that has gone unnoticed in the legal domain, and uncovers the ways that the law school classrooms and other organized spaces currently tend to keep emotional-awareness and interactional-awareness out of legal education practice and discourse, and fail to create space for developing positive racial interactions and skill-building in the classroom; and (3) it offers more than two dozen specific, original or adapted practices for individual, interpersonal and systemic support in opening up space for conversation, learning, and development of positive interactions across race-based and other identity differences

The Way of ColorInsight: Understanding Race and Law Effectively Through Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices

Despite much good effort to the contrary, reports from a wide variety of fields and locations serve daily to remind us that race still matters in America. To many legal scholars, these reports are not only not news but they suggest work that must be done within the legal academy to minimize racial bias within contemporary law. For example, in his groundbreaking Article, Trojan Horses of Race, Jerry Kang highlighted the research identifying and confirming implicit bias as a pervasive cognitive, interpersonal dynamic, and placed on the research agenda that should follow this revelation scholarship by law professors examining “teaching strategies,” as well as “debiasing programs, and [educational] environments.” More recently, Margalynne Armstrong and Stephanie Wildman have argued that educators, especially those in law, must move from “colorblindness to color insight,” developing approaches to teaching law which increase our capacity to understand race, and in particular Whiteness, and its pervasive operation in the law. This is so even though teaching and learning about race, and especially about Whiteness, is notoriously difficult for all of us. To teach about race in ways that increase understanding and minimize bias, and to do so in increasingly diverse classrooms requires that we each continually explore new methods and be radically open to adopting what works. This Article breaks ground by importing analyses and findings from the interdisciplinary literature on the pedagogy of race into the legal education literature, a body of scholarship which elaborates how both colorblindness and implicit bias may impact performance in law school classrooms and in practice beyond, and by identifying ways that contemplative pedagogy may be an important component of effective corrective responses. Specifically, in this Article, I argue that educators may increase capacity to understand the impacts of race and color on law and legal education, minimize implicit bias, improve student performance and better promote the interests of justice in a diverse society by working to incorporate and blend these two important pedagogical trends: the theory and practice supporting inclusive and identity-safe classrooms; and the theory and practice of mindfulness in teaching and learning. Building on the work of Armstrong and Wildman, DiAngelo, and other scholars of the pedagogy of race, I identify mindfulness as essential to teaching and learning in this area. Specifically, I introduce and describe the Practices of ColorInsight as a set of mindfulnessbased and compassion-based pedagogical practices which support the development of such awareness and the building of the capacity and stamina necessary to cross-racial engagement notwithstanding the challenging issues that routinely arise across personal, interpersonal, and systemic domains