Ayres on Claudia Rankine's "Citizen": Documenting and Protesting America's Halting March Toward Racial Justice and Equality @TAMULawSchool

Susan Ayres, Texas A&M University School of Law, is publishing Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen': Documenting and Protesting America's Halting March Toward Racial Justice and Equality in the Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review. Here is the abstract.

After the first election of President Barak Obama in 2008, there was a sense that the United States had reached a post-racial phase in its history. That sentiment was relatively short-lived, because by 2013, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, it was clear that President Obama’s election was not transformative. More recently, during the presidential campaign and after the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, undisguised racism in the United States has reared its ugly head. Activists such as the Reverend Al Sharpton have been outspoken in their criticism of President Trump. Sharpton has claimed, “Everything King fought so tirelessly for is under attack once again.” Similarly, poet and activist Claudia Rankine considers the Trump Administration to be “about the primacy of whiteness,” and that as citizens, we must discuss and confront the concept of white privilege which undergirds our society. Rankine does this in Citizen, a multi-genre work that documents racist microaggressions and macroaggressions. In this article Citizen is analyzed using the tools of critical race theory and rhetoric for its potential to effect change in the fight for racial justice and equality.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Before Ferguson

Rigel Christine Oliveri, University of Missouri School of Law (Columbia), is publishing Setting the Stage for Ferguson: Housing Discrimination and Segregation in St. Louis in the Missouri Law Review. Here is the abstract.

The events of fall 2014 in Ferguson, MO (the shooting death of Michael Brown by a white police officer and the subsequent protests and riots), have been examined from many angles – the policing of minority communities, the militarized police response to peaceful protests, the poor schools and job prospects for young people like Mr. Brown, etc… This paper adds another factor to the analysis: housing discrimination. St. Louis is one of the most segregated places in the country and this is not an accident. The history of St. Louis is replete with discriminatory housing laws, policies, and practices. While these were common throughout the United States, they were particularly egregious, widespread, and pervasive in industrial mid-western cities like St. Louis. St. Louis, in fact, was where three of fair housing law’s most foundational fair housing cases emerged from: Shelly v. Kraemer, which held that racially restrictive covenants could not be enforced by courts; Jones v. Mayer, which held that private acts of race discrimination in housing were prohibited by the Civil Rights Act; and United States v. City of Black Jack, which recognized the use of disparate impact theory in fair housing cases. When we look closely at these cases – not just the legal principles that they established but the physical, racial geography of the homes, neighborhoods, and cities that were contested – we can see how they reflected the racist forces that shaped the reality of modern metropolitan St. Louis. This paper traces the history of housing discrimination in the St. Louis metro area using these cases as a framework, concluding with a discussion of how these historical forces resonate in contemporary Ferguson. The paper concludes with suggestions for reforms that might help undo what a century’s worth of officially sanctioned discrimination and segregation have wrought.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.