Intersection of Law and Race

Home > Gender and Sexuality Studies > Critical Race Studies > Intersection of Law and Race

The impact of legal decisions and the legal system on racial justice, including issues of voting rights, police brutality, and the school-to-prison pipeline.

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: This topic explores how race impacts criminal defendants, from the initial arrest to sentencing and incarceration.
Housing Discrimination: This topic examines how race affects access to housing, including redlining and other practices that deny people of color access to certain neighborhoods.
Employment Discrimination: This topic looks at how race affects hiring practices, promotion, and other aspects of the workplace.
Education Inequality: This topic explores how race impacts access to quality education, as well as the role of racism in the curriculum.
Racial Profiling: This topic investigates how race affects law enforcement practices, including stop and frisk policies and profiling based on race.
Voting Rights: This topic examines how race affects access to the ballot box, including voter ID laws and other efforts to suppress the vote.
Critical Race Theory: This topic introduces the basic tenets of Critical Race Theory, including its critique of mainstream liberal legal theory and its focus on the intersection of race and power.
Intersectionality: This topic looks at the idea of intersectionality in the context of law and race, exploring how other aspects of identity (such as gender, sexuality, and class) intersect with race to shape experiences of discrimination.
Historical Systems of Oppression: This topic examines the ways in which racism has been institutionalized in legal and political systems throughout history.
Systematic Racism: This topic explores the concept of systematic racism, particularly how it affects the lives of people of color in the United States.
Social Justice Movements: This topic looks at the role of social justice movements in addressing issues of race and law.
Whiteness Studies: This topic explores the concept of whiteness and how it relates to systems of power and privilege.
Implicit Bias: This topic looks at the ways in which unconscious biases can shape legal decision-making.
Criminalization of People of Color: This topic explores how people of color are disproportionately criminalized, particularly in the context of the war on drugs.
Reparations: This topic examines the idea of reparations for historic injustices against people of color, including slavery and segregation.
Structural Racism: It refers to the systemic and institutionalized policies and practices that perpetuate inequalities between different races.
Colorblind Racism: It refers to the failure to recognize or address racial discrimination, in the name of treating everyone equally.
Racism in the law: It refers to the laws, policies, and practices that perpetuate racial discrimination in housing, employment, education, criminal justice, and other areas of life.
Critical Race Feminism: It applies a critical race theory lens to feminist legal theory, in examining the ways race, gender, and other intersections of identities affect the experiences of women of color.
Whiteness Studies: It analyzes how white privilege operates in society, including its impact on legal systems, and explores strategies for dismantling it.
Intersectionality: It is a framework that considers how different forms of discrimination (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, class, religion) intersect and interact with each other.
Racial Formation Theory: It analyzes how race is a socially constructed category, and how it shapes people's experiences and identities.
Post-colonial theory: It explores the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and their ongoing impact on legal systems and the lives of people of color.
"The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country."
"The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s."
"The movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests."
"African Americans were subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by white supremacists in the South."
"At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, in 1954 the Supreme Court struck down many of the laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States as unconstitutional."
"The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings against racist discrimination, including the separate but equal doctrine, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations."
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, including racial segregation in schools, businesses, and in public accommodations."
"The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minority voters."
"The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing."
"The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1965 to 1975, challenged Black leaders of the movement for its cooperative attitude and its adherence to legalism and nonviolence."
"Its leaders demanded not only legal equality, but also economic self-sufficiency for the community."
"Martin Luther King Jr. was the most visible leader of the movement."
"From 1964 through 1970, a wave of riots and protests in black communities dampened support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations."
"African Americans who had seen little material improvement since the civil rights movement's peak in the mid-1960s, and still faced discrimination in jobs, housing, education and politics."
"The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, 'sit-ins' in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery."
"After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved."
"Various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal and civil rights, such as the civil rights movement (1865–1896) and the civil rights movement (1896–1954)."
"These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott..."
"Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage."
"However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any particular person, organization, or strategy."