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:  

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.

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.

"After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, claiming a never documented "military necessity," ordered the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II solely because of their ancestry. As Roger Daniels movingly describes, almost all reluctantly obeyed their government and went peacefully to the desolate camps provided for them. Daniels, however, focuses on four Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the government and their own community leaders by challenging the constitutionality of the government's orders. The 1942 convictions of three men--Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu--who refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently went to camp and then filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered her release in 1944, following her two and a half years behind barbed wire. Neither the cases nor the fate of law-abiding Japanese attracted much attention during the turmoil of global warfare; in the postwar decades they were all but forgotten. Daniels traces how, four decades after the war, in an America whose attitudes about race and justice were changing, the surviving Japanese Americans achieved a measure of political and legal justice. Congress created a commission to investigate the legitimacy of the wartime incarceration. It found no military necessity, but rather that the causes were "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 1982 it asked Congress to apologize and award $20,000 to each survivor. A bill providing that compensation was finally passed and signed into law in 1988. There is no way to undo a Supreme Court decision, but teams of volunteer lawyers, overwhelmingly Sansei--third-generation Japanese Americans--used revelations in 1983 about the suppression of evidence by federal attorneys to persuade lower courts to overturn ^the convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu. Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with present-day issues of national security and individual freedom"--;"Focuses on four Supreme Court cases involving Japanese Americans who were forcibly detained and relocated to interment camps in the early months of World War II, despite the absence of any charges or trials to address the validity of their implied guilt. Daniels, one of the acclaimed authorities on this subject, reminds us that Constitution promises much but does not always deliver when the nation is in crisis"--

"The bill is part of a national campaign that began after high-profile incidents of Black students being forced to cut or change their hair."

"Limits authority of school district to become member of voluntary organization that administers interscholastic activities unless organization implements policy that prohibits discrimination based on race color or national origin. Clarifies meaning of race to include natural hair hair texture hair type and protective hairstyles for purposes of prohibited discrimination under antidiscrimination statutes. Clarifies that valid dress code or policy may not have disproportionate adverse impact on members of protected class to extent that is greater than impact on persons generally."

"US District Court for the Northern District of California - 584 F. Supp. 1406 (N.D. Cal. 1984) April 19 1984"

"This bill makes lynching a federal hate crime offense."

"Justices of the United States Supreme Court have heard and ruled on many cases that have dealt with race”questions such as who has the right to use the courts where can black and white people live what public schools can a person attend and how can education be equal for everyone? For the courts rulings from earlier cases set a precedent for current and future rulings. Sometimes the Court even states when an earlier Court's ruling was just flat out wrong or misguided. The five cases below were decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and dealt with how the Court interpreted race and who has rights under the law."

"The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a legal battle involving one of the most offensive words in the English language spurning a case raising whether its utterance in the workplace even one time creates a hostile work environment."

"On January 5 2022 the governor of Louisiana posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy the defendant in the famous 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is known for affirming the legal theory of 'separate but equal' that was used to justify Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was later overturned in part by Brown v. Board of Education."

"This page outlines various key court cases that deal with racial issues from a legal standpoint. These sites offer an introduction and information about historic precedents and other data that also impact on viewpoints found in relation to decisions made within wider society."

"Over the past two decades there has been an outpouring of scholarship that explores the problem of implicit bias. Through this work commentators have taken pains to define the phenomenon and to describe the ways in which it contributes to misunderstanding discrimination inequality and more."