Antiracism, Cultural Competency & Civil Rights

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws--the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends the understanding of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

"The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971. Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated "the concentration camp law" and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist"--The publisher's description

Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.--Publisher description.

The essays in this volume illuminate a central paradox in the post-colonial West: race remains a potent index of social, economic and political inequality even while racial discrimination has become unlawful, even anathema. The standard account of this paradox is that racial discrimination and inequality are unfortunate vestiges of the past, which an enlightened legal system is now engaged in extirpating. These essays reveal a different story: equality law preserves racial inequality even while denouncing it. The authors show how in country after country, legal rules define racism so narrowly and make racial discrimination so difficult to prove that inequality persists despite its symbolic extinction. This ground-breaking volume of English-language essays, aimed at academics and researchers, shows how critical race theory, an analytic approach developed in the United States, can shed light on the workings of race in political-legal systems as diverse as South Africa, New Zealand, France and Latin and South America.