Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2-11-2009

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Humanities Network; delete2

Abstract

The fiftieth anniversary of Brown v Board of Education provided a good time to step back and survey recent writings about race It brought forth a wealth of scholarshipretrospective critical and celebratory The three books that I take as illustrative are each in their way excellent Reflective even ruminative All Deliberate Speed interweaves the story of author Charles Ogletrees life with national events that took place during the same period such as the Brown decision the Anita HillClarence Thomas hearings and the lawsuit for black reparations growing out of the 1921 Tulsa riots Ogletrees book brings these events to life while reinforcing how much remains to be done to effectuate Browns mandate In Whitewashing Race Michael K Brown and his coauthors put forward a scorching critique of an emerging neoconservative approach to race and show how it has produced a new type of toughminded realist racism exemplified by Stephen and Abigail Thernstroms America in Black and White One Nation Indivisible Alexander Tsesiss book The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom audaciously seeks to reorient racial jurisprudence so that it avoids the cultural inertia and doctrinal baggage that recent books including the other two reviewed here document He seeks to place such jurisprudence on sounder footingAlthough these otherwise strong books contribute greatly to current knowledge they like much recent writing about race nevertheless devote scant attention to two issues that ought to be on the agenda of every serious treatment of race white privilege and the place of nonblack groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans in the civilrights equation Not only for African Americans but also for other groups two forces oppression and favoritism maintain white supremacy so that ending one without attention to the other would do little to improve matters If the demise of formal statesponsored racism has left in place a system of informal favors exchanges informational networks oldboy references and collegeentrance criteria by which whites see to their own the system of whiteoverblack power relations will hardly budge White privilege thus demands the serious attention of every race scholarThis Review proceeds in four parts Part I describes the three books Part II highlights what is valuable in each and points out a few minor respects in which they fall short Parts III and IV identify a deeper shortcoming the failure to come to terms with white privilege and the blackwhite binary paradigm of race issues that lie outside the conventional paradigm of race scholarship but that are becoming more salient with each passing day

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