Race, Rights, and Collective Memory

• In Event: 174 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. The State and Racial Exclusion

Abstract

Legal institutions are prominent sites of struggle over the status of race in the United States. This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding contested constructions of rights as questions of collective memory, where law is significant for both reflecting and shaping representations of racial domination. Antidiscrimination law, the key mechanism through which the principle of racial equality is enforced in the United States, is a starting point for examining this process. The relationships among race, rights, and memory are explored along three dimensions. First, law articulates collective memories of race. In the post-civil rights era, certain manifestations of racial oppression are categorized as legal relations and prohibited by law, but drawing these legal definitions in turn shapes social understandings of the phenomenon defined. By locating blame with individuals, antidiscrimination law truncates the range of conceptual possibilities available for Americans to make sense of contemporary racism. Second, law acts as an institutional guidepost for memory, exercising jurisdiction over social relations of race by informing understandings of the historical trajectory of social change. Societal understandings of racism are closely identified with those oppressive acts that are remediable under law. Third, understandings of rights and the meaning of equality reflect memories of race. The racial ideology of colorblindness sees white advantage as historically independent of and unrelated to black disadvantage. This perspective, based on a denial of the collective quality of whiteness as such, informs attacks on race-conscious remedies, including affirmative action, in legal and popular discourse.

Author

• David Reed McElhattan, Northwestern University