Syllabus: Asian Americans and the Law

This is the accompanying syllabus to the essay by Professor Chang, “Teaching Asian Americans and the Law: Struggling with History, Identity, and Politics.” The article explores the goals and challenges in constructing a course on Asian Americans and the Law. In his course on Asian Americans and the Law, Professor Chang tries to include in the weekly reading packets history, narratives, and cases. Professor Chang includes the narratives because he has found that the students often have a difficult time relating to the history without them. After all, narratives bring life to history, making it easier for students to relate to and/or identify with the historical persons who occupy very different subject positions with regard to race, nationality, immigration history, class, and gender. He also includes cases because they simultaneously document enactments of power directed against persons of Asian ancestry and stand as examples of active resistance by those persons in the face of state and private power

Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and Narrative Space

As Asian Americans join the legal academy in growing numbers, they change the face of the academy and challenge its traditional legal doctrines. The author announces an \u27Asian American Moment in the legal academy and an opportunity to reverse the pattern of discrimination against Asian Americans. Traditional civil rights work and current critical race scholarship fail to address the unique issues for Asian Americans, including nativistic racism and the model minority myth. Space must be made in the legal academy for an Asian American Legal Scholarship and the narratives of Asian Americans. The author asserts that the rational-empirical mode is inadequate as a justification for narrative scholarship and argues for a post-structural basis for Asian American Legal Scholarship. He provides historical examples of how narrative can be used to effect social change. Finally, the author offers a framework for constructing an Asian American Legal Scholarship which acknowledges the tremendous diversity among the disempowered but which also recognizes that it is through solidarity that Asian Americans will gain the freedom to express their diversity

Closing Essay: Developing a Collective Memory to Imagine a Better Future

This closing essay to a symposium inaugurating UCLA Law School\u27s Program in Critical Race Studies suggests that the racialized Asian American body can operate as a site for collective memory and thus serve as reminders of past mistakes in order to restrain current and future abuses of power. One of the lessons to be learned is from World War II when extreme subordination of one Asian American group, Japanese Americans, was accompanied by the elimination of certain barriers for another Asian American group, Chinese Americans. A similar dynamic may be happening now following September 11. With the increase in legal and extralegal discrimination against Middle Easterners and South Asians, other previously marginalized groups may experience an apparent lessening of discrimination directed against them. The essay argues that this is illusory or temporary and that discrimination directed against one group ultimately reinforces the system of racial stratification and discrimination that harms all racial minorities

Asian Americans and the Road to the White House: Musings on Being Invisible

In October 1993, the Asian Law Journal published its inaugural issue, featuring its first article entitled Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and Narrative Space. I ASIAN L.J. 1 (1993). With this opening salvo, the Asian Law Journal (now the Asian American Law Journal) launched only the second law journal in the United States dedicated to Asian American Jurisprudence. The author of this landmark article is none other than Professor Robert S. Chang, one of the most recognized figures in Asian American Jurisprudence and Critical Race Theory. To celebrate the fifteen years since the publication of the inaugural issue and this landmark article, the Asian American Law Journal held its Fifteenth Anniversary Dinner on October 18, 2008. Professor Robert S. Chang was the keynote speaker. What follows is Professor Chang\u27s keynote address, delivered two weeks before the historic 2008 presidential election

Racial Cross-Dressing

Professor Chang provided a shorter version of this article as a talk at the First Annual LatCrit Conference sponsored by California Western School of Law and held in La Jolla, California from May 2-5, 1996. In this article Professor Chang addresses the subject of gender-bending - and for that matter, race bending – and how they may indeed do important political work, we must approach such performances with caution. They may represent instances of appropriation – as in misappropriation - just as easily as they may represent claims to solidarity and thus a basis for collective political action. Stated differently, moments of cross-dressing contain within them oppressive as well as emancipatory possibilities. The difficulty lies in telling these representations apart. If we recognize a person’s (formally male) claim to a subject position as woman” and lesbian this allows for agency in a way that permits the construction of open political identities. Understood in this way, a transsexual female’s claim to be lesbian and a Caucasian claim to be Latina might be sensible as claims to political identifies, rather than to essential identities. They are disrupting the inertia of essentialist notions of identity and are laying the groundwork for developing a collective political identity

Will LGBT Antidiscrimination Law Follow the Course of Race Discrimination Law

This Article examines several decades of race antidiscrimination law to conjecture about the course LGBT civil rights might take following Obergefell v. Hodges. It draws from Alan Freeman’s germinal Minnesota Law Review article, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, and asks whether Freeman’s thesis that race antidiscrimination law actually serves to legitimize the status quo of real-world racial inequality might apply with equal force in the context of LGBT civil rights and LGBT inequality. The Article suggests that the Court may develop, similar to its colorblind constitutionalism, a “sexuality-blind constitutionalism” in which formal equality is achieved but where distinctions drawn between public and private as well as the accommodation of religion might produce equality in name while leaving much inequality unredressed and legally unredressable. While not arguing for the abandonment of civil rights efforts in federal courts, the Article urges that these efforts be accompanied by efforts in state courts as well as in the political sphere at all levels. State level efforts may result in an unsatisfactory patchwork of equality and inequality based on geography, but state level advances in equality may inform changes that occur eventually at the federal level

(Racial) Profiles in Courage, or Can We Be Heroes, Too?

This article begins with the controversy over a proposed monument based on a widely disseminated photograph of three firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center. The three firefighters were White. The proposed monument would have had one White firefighter, one Black, and one Hispanic. This article argues that the controversy over the proposed monument serves as a microcosm for the larger and more important struggle over racial and gender diversity within fire departments, generally

Dreaming in Black and White: Racial-Sexual Policing in The Birth of a Nation, The Cheat, and Who Killed Vincent Chin?

Professor Chang observes that Asians are often perceived as interlopers in the nativistic American family. This conception of a nativist family is White in composition and therefore accords a sense of economic and sexual entitlement to Whites, ironically, even if particular beneficiaries are recent immigrants. Transgressions by those perceived to be illegitimate, such as Asians and Blacks, are policed either by rule of law or the force of sanctioned vigilante violence. Chang illustrates his thesis by drawing upon the three films referenced