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Devon Carbado
Devon W. Carbado is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Carbado, who recently served as the Vice Dean of the Faculty, teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. He was elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law Classes of 2000 and 2006, is the 2003 recipient of the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, and was recently awarded the University Distinguished Teaching Award, The Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. He is a recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which modeled on the Guggenheims, is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education.
Abstract
"After Obama: Three Post-Racial Challenges"
Pundits across the political spectrum are suggesting that the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has ushered in a new era of post-racial politics. What precisely this will mean is decidedly less than clear. What should be clear, however, but is already becoming unspeakable, is that race remains a factor in American life, even after Obama. Now more than ever it is crucial that we demonstrate the ways in which this is so. Broadly articulated, that is the aim of my presentation.
More specifically, I will focus on three challenges the after-Obama political moment presents. The first challenge is answering a seemingly straightforward question: What exactly is discrimination on the basis of race? Here, I will suggest that all too often we rush to answer that question without engaging its predicate: What exactly is race? I will offer a model for thinking about the social construction of race, which I will then employ to provide at least one answer to the question of what exactly is discrimination on the basis of race.
Next, I will discuss a significant doctrinal barrier to anti-racist legal reform that the Obama presidency inherits: the strict scrutiny regime of equal protection jurisprudence. Under this body of law, governmental racial consciousness that takes the form of invidious discrimination and governmental racial consciousness that takes the form of affirmative action are constitutionally processed in the same way. Until now, colorblindness has fueled this juridical racial project. After Obama, post-racialism is an additional ideological resource. I will explain why it is important that we contest this racial project and outline one strategy we might employ to do so.
A final racial challenge after Obama is to delineate structural and historicized accounts of racism. Omi and Winant provide one such account in Racial Formation. I will offer another one under the rubric of “racial naturalization.”
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 9:15 a.m. as part of the opening keynote address.
Select Publications
Editor (with Rachel Moran) “Critical Race Law Stories,” Foundation Press, 2008.
Editor (with Donald Weise), “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin,” San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003.
Editor (with Dwight McBride and Donald Weise), “Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction,” San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002.
Editor, “Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality: A Critical Reader,”
New York University Press, 1999.
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