Race Rights and the Law Blog

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Sahar Aziz
May 24, 2021
  Not since the 1960s has the United States been as racially charged as it is today. The rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is forcing Americans to confront centuries of systemic state abuse of African Americans. As a result, younger Americans no longer believe the myth that their society is colour-blind.     Like the Civil Rights Movement of five decades ago, BLM has brought to light…
SpearIt
May 3, 2021
Kamala Harris took heat for being a prosecutor, but lawyers of color should not avoid this noble calling. Prosecutors are powerful and should be diverse. I had no idea I was holding my breath until I let out a deep exhale when I heard the jury had found Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in killing George Floyd. It was a great day to breathe deeply for Floyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Aiyana…
SpearIt
April 28, 2021
Convicting a police officer is rare.    Juries are hesitant to second-guess split-second decisions. The killing of George Floyd was unique. This case did not involve a split-second judgment call on whether to shoot. Instead, video evidence showed that rather than a split-second decision, Derek Chauvin made a 9-minute-and-29-second decision while Floyd and traumatized bystanders pleaded with…
SpearIt
April 27, 2021
Review of Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (2020). Garrett Felber’s book, Those Who Know Don’t Say, offers a fresh and fearless new intellectual and activist history of the Nation of Islam (NOI), which situates a critique of the carceral state as central to the Black Freedom movement. Felber is a historian, who has…
Sahar Aziz
April 26, 2021
Belonging.  To Be. To Long for.  To long to belong in a space where one feels safe, wanted, normal.  Is to belong to be normal? Who is normal?  Who decides? Who sets the norm? for you, for me, for us.  But for us to exist, there must be a them.  So does belonging axiomatically require exclusion, boundaries, insiders, outsiders,                                               us versus them?…
Sahar Aziz
April 20, 2021
  At a recent book talk hosted by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick discussed a question percolating among American progressive political circles: why are so many progressives not applying their commitments to counter racism, settler-colonialism, and human rights violations to Palestinians?  What explains what is commonly known as PEP -…
Vinay Harpalani
April 11, 2021
Below is a message from Professor Tristin Green about submitting proposals for the Third Annual Equality Law Scholars' Forum.  I participated in this event back in 2017, and I would strongly encourage any young scholars working in the relevant areas to submit a proposal.  It is a great opportunity on many levels. -- Last year, we had to cancel our two-day, in-person Spring 2020 Equality Law…
Christopher Ogolla
April 7, 2021
The recent surge of migrants in the southern border has thrust the issue of immigration to the forefront of public discourse. It is so much so that House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican members of Congress visited the border in March 2021 to highlight the crisis.[1] During the Trump Administration, it used to be the Democrats who visited the border to highlight the migrant crisis…
SpearIt
April 5, 2021
We have come a mighty long way in our criminal justice system. We have gone from a period of time when people of African descent were not considered humans and were deliberately excluded from serving on jury panels to seeing Black judges, defense attorneys and prosecuting attorneys taking part in selecting more diverse juries. Progress has been made, but how far have we really journeyed, and are…
Vinay Harpalani
March 31, 2021
Professor Tristin Green of the University of San Francisco School School of Law has posted I'll See You at Work: Spatial Features and Discrimination, which will be published in the UC Davis Law Review in Fall 2021.  Below is the abstract, and the full article is available right here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3811011 AbstractWe increasingly talk about HR practices and…