Honoring Derrick Bell

Yesterday, a giant in modern legal thought passed away at the age of 80. Derrick Bell was best known as an early pioneer of critical race theory, a stream of legal thought that we have written about before in this blog. At the center of critical race theory is the rejection of objectivity. As Peggy McIntosh pointed long enough ago that Jacob complains it is too basic, white people cannot know all the privilege they possess just by virtue of being white. That is not a point about fault; rather it's a statement about our collective inability to escape our own expereince. While law is founded on "objective" principles, they are really the objective principles according to almost entirely white male judges and legislators over the centuries. Instead, critical race theory embraces narratives and a variety of perspectives, particularly those voices of color that were missing for all those years.

As an academic discipline, critical race theorists began pointing out the irony that so many of the legal academics writing about race and more generally, the academics that were even employed, were not people of color. If the fact of law being mostly written by white people was a problem, then obviously it was a problem that the legal commentary in the academy was also written by all white people. That's why I love this paragraph from the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that is not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

Eventually, for example, he left Harvard Law because they had not yet hired a black woman on the faculty. Because he believed that legal thought was not being shaped enough by black voices, he would not remain part of a school that used its immense influence to exacerbate the problem.

Privilege Is That Which You Take for Granted

TransGriot

I was sort of daydreaming a day or two ago, waiting for the time (oh so close, yet oh so very far away) when I will no longer be a law student, and when I will be done with the bar exam. I was thinking how nice it would be to travel abroad for a bit. Then in that radical whimsy (by law student standards) that comes with daydreaming, I imagined that wow, it'd be cool to live abroad for some time. Then my thoughts turned to what it might be like to live in a country with an official religion, say Christianity. (Of course many of our current politicians believe the this is one such country, but I digress.) I got a little creeped out at the thought. The reason is that in this thought experiment, there is an official government declaration that because I am Jewish, I am other.

Hate group VDARE adopts Stephanie Grace as a cause

Remember Stephanie Grace, the Harvard law student who "absolutely [does not] rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent?"  Well, looks like noted paleoconservative, crypto-white-nationalist hate group VDARE has taken up her cause.

They've published several articles referencing or defending Ms. Grace, most recently using Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow's denunciation of Grace's comments as an excuse to oppose her as a potential Supreme Court nominee while positing the idea of asking actual nominee Elena Kagan how she would have reacted to the situation.

As mentioned in a comment on our previous coverage of Ms. Grace's remarks, her inevitable adoption as a poster child by some rather heinous racist groups will likely be the most jarring fallout for this law student.  Words matter.

What does a Harvard 3L's racist email say about law school/legal culture?

If you haven't heard about this, well the story is in the posts. But basically, Stephanie Grace (pictured above), a Harvard 3L who's clerking for Kozinsky on the 9th Circuit next year, wrote an email idly wondering if maybe black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. She at least hasn't seen conclusive evidence that they're not... Sigh. Ok, then people like David Lat over at ATL proceed to say that all discussions should be open for rational debate, and we shouldn't overreact and try to ruin her life and such, and especially shouldn't name her. (Whoops?)

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?