Race Rights and the Law Blog
Sahar Aziz
June 12, 2020
Roma Rights and Civil Rights
European scholars are increasingly confronting questions of race—a notable turn for a community that, in the shadow of Nazism and eugenics, had avoided race for decades. One catalyst for this discourse is the literature about Europe’s largest racialized minority, the Roma, which itself has taken a critical turn in the last ten years. Ushering in this change, scholars…
SpearIt
June 11, 2020
President Donald Trump recently threatened to interfere with several states in their attempts to control the protests associated with the George Floyd murder. Trump’s edict, filled with hyperbolic language, photo ops, and reference to protecting Second Amendment rights, reflects his authoritarian view of the U.S. presidency.
Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his lay view of the power of the…
Vinay Harpalani
June 10, 2020
Professor Jelani Jefferson Exum has posted a new article entitled Sentencing Disparities and the Dangerous Perpetuation of Racial Bias, published in the WASHINGTON AND LEE JOURNAL OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. Below are the abstract and citation. The article is available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol26/iss2/5/
Abstract
This Article addresses the role that racial…
Sahar Aziz
June 8, 2020
Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights (CLIHHR) launched Confronting Structural Violence: Law Teaching Guides to provide open-access teaching resources for professors.
Law faculty in a range of disciplines can download and immediately use any of the 10 open-access Law Teaching Guides, which are grounded in cases many professors already teach and cover topics that are currently making…
SpearIt
June 7, 2020
In an unprecedented edict during the civil strife aimed to end the epidemic of police brutality, President Trump on Monday evening declared himself “the law and order president,” and promised to unleash the United States military against U.S. citizens in order to stop “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others.”
At first blush, an effort…
Sahar Aziz
June 5, 2020
Last week, when I saw the video of George Floyd’s extrajudicial killing by law enforcement, a familiar sense of anguish, fury, hopelessness, and malaise swept over me. So did a sense of helplessness. We had seen this video before, over the long and many years. We had read this story. And yet, I had never before witnessed such a starkly calm extinguishment of a human life – a Black human…
Sahar Aziz
June 3, 2020
In The Fire Next Time, acclaimed author James Baldwin shared a long letter he wrote to his nephew and godson, also named James. Baldwin began the letter by explaining how racism had slowly destroyed the essence of the boy’s father, also Baldwin’s younger brother. In relaying this story, Baldwin recalled a moment when his little brother fell down the stairs as a child and their mother “easily…
Sahar Aziz
June 2, 2020
As educators, we cannot help but ask ourselves whether our teaching, mentoring, and guidance of students through the years has positively impacted our society. Is our society less racist, less classist, less sexist, less homophobic, less Islamophobic, less anti-Semitic than when we were growing up? To be a teacher, is to believe in the next generation to do the social justice work our…
Sahar Aziz
June 1, 2020
In a 1962 essay for The New Yorker Magazine the renowned African American author and public intellectual James Baldwin wrote a widely cited quote: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes (the acceptable term at the time) reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”[1]
Almost fifty years later his words still ring true. The rebellions in urban areas…
Nadia Ahmad
May 27, 2020
Below is an excerpt from Professor Ian F. Haney López's (Berkeley) interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books regarding his book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America. Haney López is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Haney López has co-chaired the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice,…