The United States Supreme Court: An Intellectual White Space

• In Event: 2454 - Critical Theory II: Critical Race Theory

Abstract

I examine the critical race literature on racial inequality cases in the United States Supreme Court. Critical race theorists have consistently cited that the Court in racial inequality cases has gone against the interests of people of color. Scholars such as Derrick Bell, Michael K. Brown, George Lipsitz, and Kimberly Crenshaw wrote extensively on the social, political, economic interests of people of color in racial inequality cases at the Court that involve desegregation, affirmative action, school busing, and criminal justice, and these scholars presented findings in their analyses that the Court are most often dismissive of people’s of color claims when advocating their interests. Based on my survey of the critical race literature, there is evidence that the Court is an intellectual white space, in which the Court as a whole plays the role of an ideological arbitrator legitimatizing legal rationales consistent with the white dominant framework and delegitimatizing legal rationales based on racial justice principals that embodied the interests of people of color.

Author

• Gunercindo Antoneo Espinoza, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities