Despite the intense recent scrutiny on African-Americans and U.S. race relations sparked by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s arrest by Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley (see post above), there is a long history of academic analysis on U.S. race relations and the law.Recently, I asked colleagues on an academic list-serv with expertise on these issues to suggest readings on race in America in general, on the criminal justice system in particular, and U.S. race relations in international perspective.
We could have filled several libraries and institutes with the responses to such a request of course. For example, I name below just a few research centers of which I am aware and knowing that there are many others I’ve omitted:
►the Arthur R. Ashe Foreign Policy Library (TransAfrica Forum);
►the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African & African-American Research (Harvard University);
►the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (Harvard Law School);
►the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (Northeastern University School of Law)
►the Institute on Race and Justice (Northeastern University);
►the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality (Seattle University School of Law);
►the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University);
►and the Arthur C. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library).
Thanks to colleagues on that list-serv for their suggestions and past discussions. With no claim to comprehensiveness, here’s an eclectic sample from their offerings and from my own quick research. The resources below are primarily law-related and reflect a range of political and methodological perspectives. I encourage readers to add their own race and law-related resources in the comments section.
Race, Racism, and U.S. Law
Guide to Internet Resources on Race, Racism, and American Law (University of California at Hastings)
Derrick A. Bell, Race, Racism & American Law (Aspen, 6th ed., 2008)
Mary Frances Berry, My Face is Black, Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Vintage, 2006)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2006)
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present (Routledge, 2007)
Robert S. Chang, Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State (NYU Press, 1999)
Robert S. Chang, Teaching Asian Americans and the Law: Struggling with History, Identity, and Politics. Asian Law Journal, 2002
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New Press, 1996; 2001)
Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York University Press, 2001)
Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory : the Cutting Edge (Temple University Press, 2nd ed., 2000)
Richard Delgado, Juan F. Perea, & Jean Stefancic, eds., Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials (West, 2008)
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (The Gender Lens) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2007)
Annette Gordon-Reed, Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, p. 1707, 1993
A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Emma Coleman Jordan & Angela Harris, Economic Justice: Race, Gender, Identity, and Economics (Foundation Press, 2005)
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Ian Haney Lopez, Race, Law, and Society (Ashgate Publishing, 2006)
Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race
Rhonda V. Magee,The Third Reconstruction: An Alternative to Race Consciousness and Colorblindness in Post-Slavery America. Alabama Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2003
George A. Martinez, Kevin R. Johnson, and Timothy Davis, eds., A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law: A Multiracial Approach (Carolina Academic Press, 2001)
Rachel Moran & Devon W. Carbado, eds., Race Law Stories (Foundation Press, 2008)
Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Routledge, 2nd ed. 1994)
Juan F. Perea, Richard Delgado, Angela P. Harris, Jean Stefancic, Stephanie M. Wildman, Race and Races, Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (Thomson West / Foundation Press, 2nd ed., 2007)
Race and the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Ian Ayres & Jonathan Borowsky, A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department (American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, October 2008)
Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present (Vintage, 2000)
Paul Butler, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (New Press, 2009)
Center for Constitutional Rights, Racial Disparity in NYPD Stops-and-Frisks: Preliminary Report on UF-250 Data from 2005 through June 2008
Frank Rudy Cooper, “Who's the Man?”: Masculinities and Police Stops (August 25, 2008). Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 08-23
M. Katherine B. Darmer, Teaching Whren to White Kids: Why a 'Color-Blind' Approach to Law School Admissions and Hiring Impoverishes Legal Education, Michigan Journal of Race and the Law, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2009
Angela J. Davis, Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Richard Thompson Ford, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Race Makes Race Relations Worse (pbk. ed., Picador, 2009)
Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, Alex Kiss, An Analysis of the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias (Columbia University, Dec. 14, 2005)
David A. Harris, Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work (W.W. Norton, 2003)
David A. Harris, Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing (New Press, 2005)
Sherrilyn A. Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century (Beacon Press, 2007)
Paula Johnson, Joyce A. Logan, and Angela J. Davis, eds., Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison (NYU Press, 2004)
Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (Vintage, 1998)
Ian Haney Lopez, Post-Racial Racism: Crime Control and Racial Stratification in the Age of Obama, (forthcoming; draft available on SSRN)
Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Boston Review Books, 2008)
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., & Austin Sarat, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (NYU Press, 2006)
Greg Ridgeway, Analysis of Racial Disparities in the New York Police Department's Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices (RAND Corporation, 2008)
Katheryn Russell-Brown, The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions (NYU Press, 2nd ed., 2008)
Symposium: New Approaches to Ensuring the Legitimacy of Police Conduct, St. Louis University Public Law Review, Vol. 22 (2003)
Leland Ware, Prohibiting Racial Profiling: The ACLU’s Orchestration of the Missouri Legislation, St. Louis University Public Law Review, Vol. 22, p. 59 (2003).
U.S. Race Relations in International Law and Foreign Policy Perspective
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Anne-Marie Mooney Cotter, Race Matters: An International Legal Analysis of Race Discrimination (Ashgate, 2006)
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (pbk. ed., Princeton University Press, 2002)
Ruth Gordon, Foreword: Critical Race Theory and International Law: Convergence and Divergence, Villanova Law Review, Vol. 45, no. 5 (2000)
Michael L. Krenn, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations (Potomac Books, 2006)
Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics of Diplomacy and Racial Discrimination, (2nd ed., Westview Press, 1996)
Hope Lewis, Reflections on “Blackcrit Theory”: Human Rights. Villanova Law Review, Vol. 45, No. 5, p. 1075 (2000).
Hope Lewis, Lionheart Gals Facing the Dragon: The Human Rights of Inter/National Black Women in the United States. Oregon Law Review, Vol. 76, p. 567 (1997)
Gay J McDougall, The work of the UN minority issues expert, IntLawGrrls (2009)
(See IntLawGrrls posts on Gay J. McDougall, UN Independent Expert on Minority Groups, here.)
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Henry J. Richardson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an International Human Rights Leader. Villanova Law Review, Vol. 52, p. 471, 2007.
Henry J. Richardson, The Origins of African-American Interests in International Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2008)
Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (Plume, 2001)
Symposium: Critical Race Theory and International Law: Convergence and Divergence, Villanova Law Review Vol. 45, no. 5 (2000)
Adrien K. Wing, ed., Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (NYU Press, 2000)
Jeanne M. Woods & Hope Lewis, Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions (Transnational, 2005).
