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Abstract:
This closing essay to a symposium inaugurating UCLA Law School's Program in Critical Race Studies suggests that the racialized Asian American body can operate as a site for collective memory and thus serve as reminders of past mistakes in order to restrain current and future abuses of power. One of the lessons to be learned is from World War II when extreme subordination of one Asian American group, Japanese Americans, was accompanied by the elimination of certain barriers for another Asian American group, Chinese Americans. A similar dynamic may be happening now following September 11. With the increase in legal and extralegal discrimination against Middle Easterners and South Asians, other previously marginalized groups may experience an apparent lessening of discrimination directed against them. The essay argues that this is illusory or temporary and that discrimination directed against one group ultimately reinforces the system of racial stratification and discrimination that harms all racial minorities.

racial stratification, discrimination, racialized Asian American body

Abstract:
Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated.

The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts to engage in African American literary criticism, and attempts to engage in black male, black feminist criticism. The racial politics of identity, boundaries, and theory are ones that the late Professors Jerome Culp, Trina Grillo, and Marilyn Yarbrough dedicated much of their lives to pursuing. This is reflected in their scholarship, which challenged existing modes of legal reasoning about race, gender, and theories of justice, and thus effected paradigm shifts in all areas. Moreover, Professors Culp, Grillo, and Yarbrough encouraged progressive legal scholars of color to think about the issues raised over the meaning and politics of black feminism, the role of theory in reasoning about race and the law, the fluidity of racial identity and its political implications, the transcendence of binary legal models, the importance of community and collaboration, and above all, an abiding disrespect for boundaries.

The letters are wide-ranging with regard to the texts that they engage, moving from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to monuments to the film Monster's Ball. The letters examine some contentious academic debates, such as those between "race men" and black feminists and between critical race theorists and their critics. In all of this, the central questions relate to who speaks and, as corollaries, who is allowed to speak and what is remembered. These questions may be methodological entry points for those doing critical race feminism.

critical race theory, feminist theory, law and literature

Abstract:
In this short piece, Professors Chang and Villazor respond to a recent article by Professors McGowan and Lindgren, which presents empirical data that they claim tends to disprove the model minority hypothesis with regard to Asian Americans. McGowan and Lindgren's article is timely in light of the debate over school admissions and affirmative action and the role that Asian Americans play but we argue that their conclusions are not warranted because of the limited nature of their inquiry. They limit the scope of their analysis to the results of surveys of non-Hispanic whites produced from face-to-face about their racial attitudes. From this, they make claims about the real world. They support their claim with graphs and statistical analyses, consistent with the recent empirical turn in legal scholarship. Their data and conclusions are likely to be used by those who seek to end affirmative action and who seek to use school admissions and affirmative action as wedge issues to create divisions among Asian Americans and to divide Asian Americans from other racial minorities. Closer scrutiny of their analysis reveals, however, the questionability of their findings. We argue that the real world is a place where people lie, where people are unaware of their biases, and where conscious and unconscious biases may not be clear or manifest themselves outside of particular contexts or situations. The result is that the work of Asian [sic] critical scholars on the model minority myth says much more about the real world than do McGowan and Lindgren and raises doubts about their empirical methodology.

Abstract:
This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias that complicates the use of student evaluations in assessing teaching effectiveness. It hypothesizes that the mechanism by which this bias manifests itself is a variant of stereotype threat, one that they call projected stereotype threat, where stereotypes of incompetence or accent are projected onto the bodies of teachers marked by difference. They examine how institutions respond or, as is more typically the case, fail to respond to these problems. They conclude with some suggestions for change, asserting that if institutions want to pay more than lip service to the goal of diversity, the success and employment conditions of women and minorities will improve only through the hiring of more women and minorities and by addressing directly the issue of bias to educate students about bias and its discriminatory effects on instructors whose bodies are marked by perceived differences and how such bias interferes with their learning.

critical race theory, civil rights, legal education, sexuality and the law, women

Abstract:
In the tradition of LatCrit Afterwords, Professors Chang and Gotanda take the liberty of raising questions that extend beyond the particular themes of this LatCrit Conference and the papers published in this Symposium. They return to two questions - ethnicity versus race and black exceptionalism - that were raised in early LatCrit Conferences but which have since been moved to the background. They ask what LatCrit Theory and Asian American Jurisprudence might teach us about minority on minority conflict and other ethno-racial fault lines. They present an analytic model to help understand commentaries on racial conflict and coalition. This model is organized around a loose historical and theoretical progression, beginning with first order binary analyses that focus on majority-minority relations; moving to second order binary analyses that focus on minority-minority relations; and then to third order multigroup analyses that examine the relationships among the majority and two or more minority groups. They then use this model to examine the comparative racialization projects in Asian American Jurisprudence. In Asian American Jurisprudence, they note that there have been explorations of both the racial and the ethnic and that in analysis of legal doctrine and legal materials, race is the dominant analytic mode. They suggest that the language of race may facilitate a comparative analysis around white supremacy that can provide a basis for coalition around a common platform of anti-racist politics. They speculate that despite the significant success LatCrit has had in fostering coalitions (within the Latina/o group and with others), LatCrit's failure to address squarely those early questions and challenges may in time jeopardize this success. Also in the tradition of LatCrit Afterwords, Professors Chang and Gotanda end with more questions than answers but hope that their set of questions will provide useful guideposts during LatCrit's second decade.

Abstract:
This chapter begins with the transnational subject and the question of identity, then shifts to the U.S. project of domestic racialization, especially as experienced by marginal subjects during wartime as they try to find a place, a rootedness that is both here and there, from which to remember and to engage in critique.

War, perhaps more than anything else, forces a nation's subjects to re-negotiate their relationship to the nation. When the United States engages in war, it also engages in a process of deepening the Americanization of its subjects. It does this by calling upon its subjects to band together collectively to do their patriotic duty against a common enemy. By performing patriotic gestures, its subjects feel a comradeship that consolidates this imagined community that is America. Benedict Anderson writes that it is this feeling of comradeship that has made millions of people willingly die for their nation.

When the United States engages in war, its marginal citizens and subjects often find themselves in an awkward position. When you are the victims of state-sponsored neglect, discrimination, and terror, how do you respond when that very state calls upon you to do your duty?

This chapter takes up this question and examines the way that the state continues the project of domestic racialization simultaneously with its outwardly directed war efforts. The chapter focuses on iconic images of war, such as the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, that help to construct an inclusive national allegory of Americanness despite the contradiction presented by the internment of Japanese Americans. It then shifts to examine the controversy over a proposed monument to the fallen firefighters at the World Trade Center Towers. It examines popular culture, history, and law to reveal the ways in which symbolic inclusion and exclusion are underwritten by law.

Abstract:
In their contribution to this symposium honoring Professor John Calmore, Professors Robert Chang and Catherine Smith analyze the recent school desegregation case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, through the lens of Professor Calmore's work. In particular, they locate this case as part of what Professor Calmore calls the Supreme Court Racial Project. Understood as a political project that reorganizes and redistributes resources along racial lines, the Supreme Court Racial Project creates a jurisprudence around race that solidifies the work of the new right and neoconservatives. Borrowing from Calmore's methodology, Professors Chang and Smith clarify the unspoken past in Parents Involved; challenge the paradigmatic present embodied in its plurality opinion; and then envision the uncreated future. In narrating the unspoken past, Professors Chang and Smith focus on Seattle. They examine the way that segregated neighborhoods and schools were created at the national level and in Seattle. They pay particular attention to the different histories of the different racial groups to show how a segregated Seattle was created and how the Seattle of today, though having a greater level of integration than before, remains a city where Whites are the most racially isolated group, which in turn produces a Seattle with largely segregated schools. In challenging this paradigmatic present, Professors Chang and Smith critique the way that housing choices that produce segregated outcomes is shielded from constitutional scrutiny are labeled as private choice, a characterization that is part of what Calmore criticizes as the neoconservative colorblind constitution. As they envision the uncreated future, Professors Chang and Smith draw from Professor Calmore's work on coalition building in a multiracial, multicultural world. They discuss the challenges that lie in store for people of color and for Whites. For people of color, one challenge is moving beyond the Black-White racial paradigm; for Whites, a primary challenge, one that is often overlooked, is overcoming White racial bonding. They argue that Professor Calmore's methodology - clarifying the unspoken past, critiquing the paradigmatic present, and envisioning the uncreated future - can help us to figure out what must be done to achieve the kind of America that is consistent with its best aspirations, the kind of America that Professor Calmore has worked so hard to achieve.

Abstract:
In this article, Professors Robert Chang and Jerome Culp examine the state of race in America in the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, focusing on the ten-year window preceding its fiftieth anniversary. Their findings reveal that while Brown established fundamental precedent in the area of race relations, racial inequality remains entrenched in a number of modern social institutions. Chang and Culp analyze this dilemma by focusing on three distinct trends. First, a cycle of inequality is driven by racial disparities in wealth and perpetuated by interlocking systems of education, housing, family, healthcare, employment, and criminal justice. Second, civil rights activists often fall short of their goals following Brown due to what the authors describe as civil rights myopias. Finally, racial remediation schemes also face major obstacles as White identity has intensified since Brown. As a result, little has changed in the ten-year window preceding Brown's fiftieth anniversary and racial inequality remains a persistent problem in America.

Abstract:
In this review of Mary Dudziak's important book, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton Univ. Press 2000), Professors Chang and Kwan find the book to provide compelling historical narratives about the intersection of the Cold War and civil rights struggles. Dudziak demonstrates through an amazing array of historical evidence a story that runs counter to the standard narrative of racial sin followed by racial redemption, which helps us to reassess who we are and to be cognizant of the work that remains.

Mary Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights, Race, Image of American Democracy, book review

Abstract:
This essay is part of a symposium that looks at what Peter Kwan has described as post-intersectionality theory. It responds to the principal article in the symposium by Nancy Ehrenreich, Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support Between Subordinating Systems. While the authors applaud the effort by Ehrenreich to advance identity theory to account for multiple oppression, they suggest that Ehrenreich and other post-intersectionality scholars work to make these theories speak more directly to legal doctrine and legal actors.

post-intersectionality theory, Nancy Ehrenreich

Abstract:
In this introductory essay to a cluster of articles on Migrations, Citizens, and Latinas/os, Professor Chang frames the work of Ruben Garcia, Camille Nelson, and Victor Romero as setting forth what might be described as truths that can be learned from the sojourner/immigrant. This essay argues that the sojourner/immigrant's contributions to U.S. society are often ignored or discounted, which may be due to a willful amnesia because we do not want to think about what we might owe the sojourner/immigrant with regard to her entry into the United States, her stay, and her departure.

Ruben Garcia, Camille Nelson, Victor Romero, Migrations, sojourner/immigrant

Abstract:
This article begins with the controversy over a proposed monument based on a widely disseminated photograph of three firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center. The three firefighters were White. The proposed monument would have had one White firefighter, one Black, and one Hispanic. This article argues that the controversy over the proposed monument serves as a microcosm for the larger and more important struggle over racial and gender diversity within fire departments, generally.

gender diversity, fire departments, world trade center flag photograph

Abstract:
This brief essay explores the goals and challenges in constructing a course on Asian Americans and the Law. In published form, this essay will be accompanied by a course syllabus.

Asian Americans, law