ABSTRACT
One of the most obvious, yet most difficult sites we have to confront the technologies of race and racist exclusions would seem to be the least technological of all: our legal system. There is an inordinate number of places within that larger site begging for careful debugging, rewriting, or possibly even the destruction of the legal codes that program racism into our American “system:” constant gerrymandering and redistricting by both Democrats and Republicans to dilute Black voting blocs; three strikes laws that eliminated whatever role rehabilitation might have once played in our corrections system and turned the prison system into a wholesale market for Black and Latino labor; absurd differences in drug sentencing laws (5 years for five grams while Rush Limbaugh, one of the major proponents of those laws claimed he was ill and needed treatment when busted for trafficking illegal drugs); Proposition 209’s elimination of affirmative action programs; the Newt Gingrich-led and Bill Clinton-enforced Contract “on” America with its scapegoating of the poor and people of color; the Hopwood and University of Michigan trials; Florida, 2000. To say that “the law” has been an important site of African American struggle is to risk ridicule because it’s so obvious. That ridicule is worth risking, however, as the last 20 years serve as an intense reminder of how central a role the law-as legislation, jurisprudence, and the processes that make both possible-plays in maintaining racism in American society.
