Antiracism, Cultural Competency & Civil Rights

"In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty in the South, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. But Roosevelt's victory created the opportunity for a group of African American intellectuals and activists to join his administration as racial affairs experts. Known as the Black Cabinet, they organized themselves into an unofficial council. They innovated antidiscrimination policy, documented the New Deal's inequalities, led programs that lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for greater federal accountability to African Americans and a greater black presence in government. But the Black Cabinet never won official recognition from Roosevelt, and with his death, it disappeared from history. This is its story"--

Professor Michele Goodwin starts at the beginning and brings us up to date. If only America’s institutions would do the same.

The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

“Listen In” to Allison Manswell as she talks with Vanessa Kelly about her impactful book on race relations: “Listen In: Crucial Conversations on Race in the Workplace,” its relevance today, and...

Kathryn Rubino talks to Lia Dorsey, newly elected President of the Association of Law Firm Diversity Professionals, and Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Dentons, about Biglaw's response to the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to Black Lives Matter. Episode Resources     Episode Highlights A difficult topic - 1:13 Tangible actions behind words - 2:34 Lia’s role and Biglaw’s role - 3:20 All the firms' different statements - 4:25 Lia’s piece of advice for law firms - 7:20 The culture of a firm - 9:13 An opportunity for the firms’ leaders - 10:06 Everybody has a role to play - 11:42 How we can move forward - 14:11 Having access to money and resources - 18:49 Promoting diversity - 19:57 Nobody has the right answer right now - 23:36   Subscribe, Share and Review To get the next episode subscribe with your favorite podcast player. Subscribe with Follow on Leave a review on

Why would Clarence Darrow—a lawyer famous for representing the little guy—take a case that meant defending a wealthy, racist murderer? What did he risk? In this episode, Mike talks about racism, power, and moral flexibility in lawyering. There is a cost to losing the values that drove us to law, and Clarence Darrow paid it. Episode Resources Connect with Mike Whelan:    The Lawyer Forward Facebook group:   The Island Murder (a PBS documentary about the Thalia Massie Affair):   Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case:  

In this episode, Mike talks about race, both in America generally and the legal system specifically. He uses the story of Italian internment in World War II to explore the idea of "otherness." Out of preferences and perceptions, as well as a history of identifying white culture with professionalism, the legal industry has created a context that's hostile to African Americans. Resolving that distance will only come after first owning our ugly history.   Episode Resources Connect with Mike Whelan    White Lawyering by Russell G Pearce:   Why the US Needs Black Lawyers:   Police killings can be captured in data. The terror police create cannot.   Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior:  

The Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice brings you the latest programming on the intersection of coronavirus and civil rights.

Judge Lydia K. Griggsby said it’s the “honor of my career” to sit on the federal bench in Baltimore and serve the community “that raised me and nurtured me as a young girl.” She is the first woman of color to serve as a district judge for the U.S. District Court of Maryland.

Dean Merit E. Janow joined Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law and renowned author, for a discussion of race and policy issues. Patricia Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, and the law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. She is a regular columnist for The Nation.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election and bestselling books like "Hillbilly Elegy" and "White Trash," there is a growing realization that whiteness is as much a social racial and political identity as being African, Latin, Asian or Native American. In partnership with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, JWJI is pleased to host a panel on the evolution of whiteness in American society. Our esteemed panel brings their interdisciplinary perspective to the panel to explain why race—including whiteness—still matters in America. (November 16, 2017) Panelists: Richard Delgado, John J. Sparkman Chair of Law, The University of Alabama School of Law, author of Critical Race Theory David Ikard, Professor of Africana Studies, Vanderbilt University, author of Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in the 21st Century Nancy Isenberg, T. Harry Williams Professor of History, Louisiana State University, author of White Trash Jane Junn, Professor of Political Science, University of Southern California, author of The Politics of Belonging: Race, Immigration, and Public Politics David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies and History, University of Kansas, author of The Wages of Whiteness The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality. http://jamesweldonjohnson.emory.edu

Bryan Stevenson, acclaimed public interest lawyer and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative delivers the 2016 Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Lecture on race and the criminal justice system. A roundtable conversation featuring Jennifer Eberhardt, Gary Segura, Robert Weisberg, JD ’79, Bryan Stevenson, and Katie Couric follows Bryan Stevenson's keynote address. OpenXChange is a year-long, student-focused initiative on campus that aims to encourage meaningful dialogue around tough issues. This is the first in a series of discussions with Stanford faculty and global experts on criminal justice, inequality and international conflict. This event was recorded on Wednesday, Jan 13, 2016

NYU Law students start the conversation regarding a new initiative led by Professor Anthony Thompson. Learn more: http://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/race-inequality-law

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. Doris Marie Provine's engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism--a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-a-vis employers. Along with the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization, American workers alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judgeshave dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor ofemployees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer.Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. As the employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas showin Unequal, though, our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favorsemployers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware ofhow the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination remains fairly common in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employmentdiscrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.

"On June 1, 1981, two young activists, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, were murdered in Seattle in what was made to appear like a gang slaying. But the victims' families and friends suspected they were considered a threat to the dictatorship of Phillippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his regime's relationship to the United States. But how could they prove it up against such powerful, and ruthless, adversaries? In SUMMARY EXECUTION attorney and author Michael Withey describes his ten-year battle for justice for Domingo and Viernes that he fought because "They killed my friends." Follow along as he embarks on a long and dangerous investigation and into the courtroom to obtain convictions of three hitmen, and then prove in U.S. federal court that Marcos was behind the assassinations. If so, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a foreign head of state would be held liable for the murder of American citizens on U.S. soil. However, to accomplish this Withey and his legal team, working with the victims' families and friends, would have to defeat concerted efforts by the murderers, and those who hired them, to cover-up their crimes and obstruct justice. Then they'd have to overcome numerous obstacles including exposing the perjured eyewitness testimony of an FBI informant, uncovering the brutal murder of an accomplice who was being sought to turn state's evidence, and working around the failure by local authorities to prosecute the Marcos operative who planned the murders.

""Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer's Life in the Battle for Change" combines Michael Tigar's wry legal and societal observations with his analysis of landmark civil rights and international justice cases on which he, as an attorney, worked . The result is a narrative that blends law, history, and progressive politics"--

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

"The standard public debate over the Fourteenth Amendment goes something like this. Critics of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment over the last several decades believe that the Court has used the Amendment's provisions for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" as open-ended vehicles for judicial policymaking, whether on abortion or gay marriage or a host of other issues. Indeed, it is difficult for someone sympathetic to the result in the 2015 gay marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges to read the Court's opinion and get the feeling that what the Court is doing is law. The case was decided under the rather nebulous concept "substantive due process," the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment's injunction that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law is not merely about process as its terms might suggest, but also about "substance"--Namely, that the clause protects unwritten, unenumerated fundamental rights or prohibits arbitrary and oppressive legislation"--

"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

"The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a road map for how to achieve this lofty goal; it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path towards the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967). Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a simple school desegregation case in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit was filed that would lead to the Lee decision. As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the United States executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabama's official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South"--

"This authoritative overview of election redistricting at the congressional, state legislative, and local level provides offers an overview of redistricting for students and practitioners. The updated second edition pays special attention to the significant redistricting controversies of the last decade, from the Supreme Court to state courts"--

Fred Korematsu, Iva Toguri (alias Tokyo Rose), Japanese Peruvians, and five thousand Americans who renounced their citizenship under duress: Rebel Lawyer tells the story of the key cases pertaining to the World War II incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and the trial attorney who defended them. Wayne Collins made a somewhat unlikely hero. An Irish American lawyer with a volatile temper, Collins s passionate commitment to the nation's constitutional principles put him in opposition to not only the United States government but also groups that acquiesced to internment such as the national office of the ACLU and the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League. Through careful research and legal analysis, Charles Wollenberg takes readers through each case, and offers readers an understanding of how Collins came to be the most effective defender of the rights and liberties of the West Coast s Japanese and Japanese American population. Wollenberg portrays Collins not as a white knight but as a tough, sometimes difficult man whose battles gave people of Japanese descent the foundation on which to construct their own powerful campaigns for redress.

A compelling study of a subtle and insidious form of racial inequality in American law and culture. Why does racial equality continue to elude African Americans even after the election of a black president? Liberals blame white racism while conservatives blame black behavior. Both define the race problem in socioeconomic terms, mainly citing jobs, education, and policing. Roy Brooks, a distinguished legal scholar, argues that the reality is more complex. He defines the race problem African Americans face today as a three-headed hydra involving socioeconomic, judicial, and cultural conditions. Focusing on law and culture, Brooks defines the problem largely as racial subordination-"the act of impeding racial progress in pursuit of nonracist interests." Racial subordination is little understood and underacknowledged, yet it produces devastating and even deadly racial consequences that affect both poor and socioeconomically successful African Americans. Brooks addresses a serious problem, in many ways more dangerous than overt racism, and offers a well-reasoned solution that draws upon the strongest virtues America has exhibited to the world.

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.

On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikîkî. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within three weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questions about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed attorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials "raced" Fukunaga to death--first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colorblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for revenge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that undergirded Hawai'ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunaga case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a racial paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.

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.

"Law school coursebook on law and the Japanese internment"--

Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize "An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another. "An admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book."--New York Times Book Review "This book should be a standard for all law students."--Boston Globe

Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.