Letters of the Law - Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law

Informationen zum Autor Sora Y. Han is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Klappentext One of the hallmark features of the post-civil rights United States is the reign of colorblindness over national conversations about race and law. But how, precisely, should we understand this notion of colorblindness in the face of enduring racial hierarchy in American society? In Letters of the Law, Sora Y. Han argues that colorblindness is a foundational fantasy of law that not only informs individual and collective ideas of race, but also structures the imaginative capacities of American legal interpretation. Han develops a critique of colorblindness by deconstructing the law's central doctrines on due process, citizenship, equality, punishment and individual liberty, in order to expose how racial slavery and the ongoing struggle for abolition continue to haunt the law's reliance on the fantasy of colorblindness. Letters of the Law provides highly original readings of iconic Supreme Court cases on racial inequality-spanning Japanese internment to affirmative action, policing to prisoner rights, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom. Han's analysis provides readers with new perspectives on many urgent social issues of our time, including mass incarceration, educational segregation, state intrusions on privacy, and neoliberal investments in citizenship. But more importantly, Han compels readers to reconsider how the diverse legacies of civil rights reform archived in American law might be rewritten as a heterogeneous practice of black freedom struggle. Zusammenfassung This book is a deconstruction of the fantasy of colorblindness founding American law. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Letters of the Law chapter abstract Drawing on concepts from critical race theory, feminist psychoanalysis and deconstruction, the Introduction exposits and explains the importance of developing a protocol of reading the law's language of race anew. "Letters of the Law" is the conceptual term designating this protocol of reading beyond the law's functional effects in or formal divisions from social reality, and toward the law's language of race on its own terms. The fantasy of colorblindness serves as the entry point into the law's language, and is further exposited through case law and critical scholarship on race and law. In the course of this exposition, the Introduction also revises the central theoretical assumptions dominating the study of race and law so that they can better reflect the centrality of fantasy, unconscious desire, and rhetoric and writing to the practice and politics of legal reform and black freedom struggle. 1Decompositional Rights chapter abstract This chapter revisits and restages U.S. Supreme Court cases on affirmative action and the critique of "reverse discrimination" claims within a broader set of jurisprudential and philosophical questions about black citizenship and civil rights. Through a close reading of how the fantasy of colorblindness is articulated in affirmative action law through a multiracial national citizenship constituted against the historical limit of slavery, this chapter argues that the figure of black citizenship occupies a type of legal standing that promises only a constant cancellation of civil rights. The black claim to civil rights not only fails to achieve the status of an affirmative recognition of a citizen subject, but also, its force as a right decomposes the philosophical interdependence between citizenship and civil rights in the broader arena of Equal Protection anti-discrimination jurisprudence. 2Colorblind Judgment chapter abstract This chapter examines and explores the formal structure of judicial review in U.S. Supreme Court cases establishing the negative right prohibiting state-enforced racial discrimination codified in the Fourtee...

Product details

• Authors: Han, Sora Y Han, Sora Y. Han
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2017
• EAN: 9781503602793
• ISBN: 978-1-5036-0279-3
• No. of pages: 184
• Series: The Cultural Lives of Law; The Cultural Lives of Law
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law