Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

8-19-2012

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; PRN Subject Matter eJournals; PSN Subject Matter eJournals; *Humanities - Forthcoming Areas; Philosophy Research Network; Social Insurance Research Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; African-American Studies; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Humanities Network; Political Science Network; Political Behavior eJournals

Abstract

"Reading Professor Obama" mines Barack Obama's syllabus on "Current Issues in Racism and the Law" for evidence of his beliefs about race law and jurisprudence The syllabus for the 1994 seminar at the University of Chicago which provides the reading assignments and structure for the course has been available on the New York Times website since July 2008 Other than a few responses solicited by the New York Times when it published the syllabus however there has been little attention to the material Obama assigned or to what it suggests about Obama's approach to the law and racismThe readings begin by discussing the malleability of racial categories and progress to cases from the nineteenth century on Native Americans and on slavery The second day's readings shifted to the Reconstruction era and changes in the Constitution and statutory law as well as the rise of the "Jim Crow" system of segregation and the response of African American intellectuals The third class covered the Civil Rights revolution and retrenchment and included reading from such diverse figures as Robert Bork Lino Graglia Martin Luther King and Malcolm X The fourth class "Where Do We Go From Here" addressed some of the enduring issues of inequality facing our nation the fragility of the African American middle class continuing racism against African Americans and a concluding plea from Cornel West for more understanding After the initial four class meetings student groups made presentations The syllabus has suggested topics for the presentations and brief discussion of those topicsRecently Obama has been linked to Derrick Bell however notwithstanding the option to read Bell's summaries of cases in lieu of the opinions themselves there is no overt endorsement of Derrick Bell Critical Race Theory "CRT" or Bell's Interestconvergence theory Obama included many critics of CRT and offered readings that indicate he hoped for substantially more discussion and perhaps ultimately economic uplift of those labeled by some of his readings "the truly disadvantaged" Obama's choice to use the title of Martin Luther King Jr's Where Do We Go from Here Chaos or Community as the title of the last group of readings suggests that Obama did not share Bell's vision of the unalterable nature of racismThe readings while instructive are just the starting point of our analysis Obama's voice appears in his framing of the suggested topics for student presentations and often aligns with arguments advanced by CRT scholars His suggested topics encourage students to wrestle with the modern consequences of racism and to question its malleability Thus we suggest that the readings and group presentation topics reveal Obama the teacher as interested in many of the key questions of Critical Race Theory even as he moved in new and pragmatic directions For he did not see racism as permanent and he sought interracial political coalitions The syllabus suggests that many of the ideas that surfaced later in candidate and President Obama were present in the classroom of Professor Obama

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