The preeminent civil rights attorneys and scholars of the past quarter-century weigh in on some of the most controversial aspects of race and the law, published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the prestigious Derrick Bell Lecture Series
Carving Out a Humanity gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates the facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium.
“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.
Originally delivered as Derrick Bell Lectures in a series at NYU School of Law, begun in 1995 and running up through 2019, Carving Out a Humanity offers an unprecedented array of today’s most creative and brilliant thinking on race and the law.
Author(s): Vincent Southerland, Janet Dewart Bell
Publisher: The New Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 368
City: New York
A Brief History of the Derrick Bell Lectures
Introduction - Congresswoman Barbara Lee
1 No Justice, No Peace - Charles Ogletree
2 Each Other’s Harvest - Charles Lawrence
3 The Archetypes That Haunt Us - Patricia J. Williams
4 Derrick Bell’s Toolkit—Fit to Dismantle That Famous House? - Richard Delgado
5 Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy - Lani Guinier
6 Accountability for Private Life - Anita Allen
7 Somebody Else’s Child - Mari Matsuda
8 From the West to the Rest: Interest Convergence in California Racial Politics - Cheryl I. Harris
9 Envisioning Abolition: Sex, Citizenship, and the Racial Imaginary of the Killing State - Kendall Thomas
10 And We Are Still Not Saved: Twenty-First-Century Constitutional Conflicts - Derrick Bell
11 Racism as the Ultimate Deception - John Calmore
12 Like a Loaded Weapon - Robert A. Williams
13 A Hip-HopTheory of Justice - Paul Butler
14 Between Slavery and Freedom: The Deep Racial Roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis - Emma Coleman Jordan
15 After Obama: Three “Post-racial” Challenges - Devon W. Carbado
16 Justice Undone: Color Blindness After Civil Rights - Ian Haney López
17 Critiquing the Family Tree: White Supremacy in the Writing of History - Annette Gordon-Reed
18 Badges and Incidents: Lingering Vestiges of Slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment - William Carter Jr.
19 The Criminal Injustice of Capital Punishment - Stephen Bright
20 What’s Left Out of Brown - Sherrilyn Ifill
21 The Society We Want - Michelle Alexander
22 A Tale of Two Americas - Theodore M. Shaw
23 The Boundaries of Whiteness: From Till to Trayvon - Angela Onwuachi-Willig
24 Race, Violence, and the Word - Kenneth W. Mack
Tributes to Derrick Bell from the Bell Lecturers
Acknowledgments
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