Critical Themes/Vocab, Pt I Flashcards
Ambivalence
At a formal level, US society is highly principled in matters of race. Yet in private, many Americans don’t hesitate to act in a prejudiced fashion.
Anti-essentialism
There is no such thing as an “essential” woman, black, Latino, etc. Pretending otherwise is a power move that can harm the weaker members of a group (e.g. black women in the women’s movement.)
Biological Race
The view, largely rejected, tat races are fixed, hereditary, and developed one per continent or land mass.
Black (brown, etc) Exceptionalism
Idea that one group’s history is so important that it deserves placement at the center of analysis. Other groups may deserve treatment too but only after we straighten out our approach to the central one.
Black-White Binary Paradigm of Race
Holds that treating two groups – usually the black and the white – as constitutive of the field of race and civil rights will result in second-hand justice for all others.
Choice (Race as)
Within limits, individuals are able to choose their race.
Colorblindness
Notion that racism consists of taking note of or commenting or classifying by race. If we all agree not to notice it, racism will wither away. A view popular in conservative thought and among many judges.
Contradiction-Closing Cases
The American legal system can’t tolerate too great a gap between our ideals of racial justice and the realities of Blacks’ lives. Every now and then, we arrange to give blacks a genuine benefit as a way of:
(1) managing our own discomfort; and
(2) maintaining legitimacy of a white-over-black system
Critique of Rights (Including Civil Rights)
A critical legal studies (CLS) view tat rights are alienating, untrustworthy, and of least use when you really need them. Solidarity and ordinary politics are better (e.g. Australia’s lack of Bill of Rights). Many critical race theorists don’t agree.
Cultural Nationalism
Idea that the main business of a Chicano, say, is to advance knowledge and the wellbeing of his or her own group.
Differential Racialization
Different groups (Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc) are constructed in different ways at different times in response to shifting social needs, such as the labor market.
Hegemony or False Consciousness
Oppressed people sometimes take on the values and beliefs of their oppressors and end up unconsciously collaborating in their own oppression (view associated with Antonio Gramsci).
E.g. Black mental enslavement, today.
Indeterminacy
Idea that legal reasoning rarely, if ever, has one right answer and that politics and social pressures on judges influence outcomes.
Interest Convergence
Holds that advances for blacks, and perhaps other groups, come only when they also benefit whites.
Internal Colonialism
Treating domestic minorities as though they were actual colonies: suppressing their culture, exploiting their labor, using some of them as overseers, etc.
Articulated by Rodolfo Acuna in regard to American treatment of Mexicans living on lands conquered by the US.
