The Sacred Way of Tibetan CRT Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach the Shadow\u27s Mystical Insight and Help Law Students Know White Structural Oppression in the Heart of the First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder to Dorothy A. Brown

Part I of this Article uses a quasi-parable, in which Dorothy Brown is a Tibetan Master who teaches law students CRT Kung Fu, the monastic fighting skills by which they will acquire the Shadow\u27s mystical insight to know the heart of the first-year curriculum. Part II challenges the organizing principles and content on which Brown\u27s Critical Race Theory purports to critically interrogate traditional legal doctrine, applying a New Age Philosophical critique as well as agency theory to crack dealing in Spanish Harlem. I use this case study to argue that crack dealers deliberately and purposefully choose extra-legal economic opportunities, even at the expense of their neighbors and community. The Conclusion demands that Race Crits think outside of the white structural oppression logical box

"Precious": A Tale of Three Explanations for Childhood Maltreatment

Precious describes a fictional child's life, in which the parents severely maltreat her. Historically, society gave parents the right to assault their children's bodies, if those assaults were not abuse but discipline. Traditionally, constitutional analysis enshrined those rights, and parents had autonomy to rear and discipline their children as they saw fit. Unfortunately, when parents abused their children and were prosecuted, few exculpatory and justificatory explanations were offered. Today, we know that parents who abuse have suffered abuse, too. Hence, Precious' parents' childhood histories help to explain her maltreatment and reveal the best framework for the etiology of her horrific suffering. This Essay proffers three explanations: Critical Race Theory's (CRT) race consciousness, Karl Marx' alienation theory, and Alice Miller's psycho-existential framework. Each approach may explain why parents maltreat their children. In brief, CRT and alienation theories operate at structural levels, well above the intergenerational transfer of actual suffering from parent to child. To be sure, structuralist theories may explain why black children like Precious suffered horrific maltreatment not by faulting the parents but by pointing to external, objective forces like white racism. CRT begins by analyzing slavery, Jim Crow, and the breakdown of the black family. Marxism likewise starts by critiquing an economic world in which capitalism's slavery exploited workers and black slaves. Yet, violent, physical assaults against children predate American Negro slavery and modern capitalism, which mean that neither of them would completely and persuasively explain childhood maltreatment. And neither approach takes us beyond believing that external, objective forces have constructed our abusive imaginations, which are enforced by the hegemonic workings of powerful whites and white structural oppression

The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez

In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement\u27s paradigm shifting possibilities

Searching for the Parental Causes of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Problem: A Critical, Conceptual Essay

(Abstract) In this critical, conceptual essay, the author argues that the School-to-Prison Pipeline (“STPP”) simply does not exist. Long before Columbine and the enactment of zero tolerance, caregivers have been wrongly harming their children, something causing them toxic stress that triggers their stress-response system, and making it nigh impossible for children easily ensnared by suspensions, expulsions, referrals to alternative schools, and SRO arrests to have the best developmental start and cognitive abilities to succeed in public schools. Further, teachers and administrators who are pressured to report great educational metrics, and for their own childhood reasons have a near inflexible need to enforce the strictest obedience rules. These elements overwhelmingly contribute to the rate at which children fall prey to the so-called STPP. But the real point is that teachers, administrators, and zero tolerance policies do not toss these children before juvenile court judges or eventually in front of criminal court judges. It is the brain structure on which these children are relying to understand and navigate their worlds that led them to externalizing behavior and criminal conduct, all of which flows from their earliest dysfunctional relationships with their well-meaning but antisocially conflicted caregivers. In this way, it is a caregiver-to-prison pipeline problem

Searching for the Parental Causes of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Problem: A Critical, Conceptual Essay

(Abstract) In this critical, conceptual essay, the author argues that the School-to-Prison Pipeline (“STPP”) simply does not exist. Long before Columbine and the enactment of zero tolerance, caregivers have been wrongly harming their children, something causing them toxic stress that triggers their stress-response system, and making it nigh impossible for children easily ensnared by suspensions, expulsions, referrals to alternative schools, and SRO arrests to have the best developmental start and cognitive abilities to succeed in public schools. Further, teachers and administrators who are pressured to report great educational metrics, and for their own childhood reasons have a near inflexible need to enforce the strictest obedience rules. These elements overwhelmingly contribute to the rate at which children fall prey to the so-called STPP. But the real point is that teachers, administrators, and zero tolerance policies do not toss these children before juvenile court judges or eventually in front of criminal court judges. It is the brain structure on which these children are relying to understand and navigate their worlds that led them to externalizing behavior and criminal conduct, all of which flows from their earliest dysfunctional relationships with their well-meaning but antisocially conflicted caregivers. In this way, it is a caregiver-to-prison pipeline problem