Adrienne D. Davis

The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective

In this article, Professor Adrienne D. Davis traces the interaction of race, sex, and estate law in the antebellum and postbellum South. Through a close analysis of intestate succession and testamentary transfers involving the formerly enslaved, she unearths the role of private law in reconciling and preserving both property rights and racial hierarchy. The article centers on a series of historical case studies involving the rights of formerly enslaved women and their children to postmortem transfers of wealth. While the law of private property generally served to reinforce racial hierarchy, these cases involved the use of property rights -- specifically, testamentary freedom -- to transfer wealth from whites to blacks. Furthermore, honoring the postmortem transfers in such cases could be read as moral tolerance or approval of the underlying interracial liaisons. Southern courts moved gingerly through this terrain of race, gender, and property rights, struggling to maintain racial hierarchy while reaffirming the system of private property. Through these case studies, the article illuminates more generally the nature of the antebellum sexual economy. With this historical study as an illustration, Professor Davis concludes that private law may play at least as significant a role as public law in the construction, recognition, and reinforcement of racial and sexual relationships.

Gran Torino and Star Trek

Race has long been a central object of political reflection. The salience of racial difference remains hotly debated, figuring in both “utopian” and “dystopian” visions of America’s political future. If race is a primary configuration of “difference” and inequality in the nation, then intimacy between the races is often construed as either a bellwether of equality and political utopia or a re-inscribing of political dominance, typically represented as sexual predation by men against women. Quite expectedly, these political fantasies and fears are often played out at the multiplex, and we can see them in stark relief in two recent films that seem to have nothing in common, Clint Eastwood’s highly acclaimed but Oscar-snubbed Gran Torino and last summer’s high-octane blockbuster, Star Trek. If Clint Eastwood has made a second career of directing himself as a cranky, alienated oldman, his turn in Gran Torino may be the capstone. Eastwood stars as a freshly widowed Korean War veteran, an unabashed bigot and misanthropic isolationist who prefers the company of his Labrador, Daisy, to that of his priest or adult children, from whom he is thoroughly alienated. Much to the chagrin of his family, Walt Kowalski insists on remaining in his Detroit neighborhood, which is “transitioning” from an ethnic white working-class community of auto plant workers to one populated by newer immigrants, predominantly Hmong, struggling to find work in Detroit’s dying economy. He initially rejects any neighborliness with his Hmong neighbors, the Lors, referring to them as “gooks” and spurning their unfamiliar customs and food. Yet, in the logic of the film, Kowalski emerges as a reluctant community hero, twice protecting the twenty-something Lor children, Sue and her brother Thao, from neighborhood predators. Despite Kowalski’s avowedly grumpy insults, Sue insists on befriending him, and Kowalski eventually warms up to both her and Thao, bestowing on the somewhat directionless the secrets of American masculinity: how to get a job and girls. Kowalski and the Lors begin to cook and spend time together, trading cultural insights and jokes, and at times simply hanging out on their porches. This portends the end of the film, in which Kowalski determines to end a Hmong gang’s grip on the Lors. As he painstakingly prepares to confront the “outlaws,” viewers might fairly anticipate a return to the Eastwood of old, who will avenge the brutal rape of Sue (Josey Wales, anyone?) and finally rid the neighborhood of terrorizing thugs. Instead, Walt Kowalski martyrs himself, organizing a shoot-out Dirty Harry meets Pale Rider style, but reaching for his old First Cavalry division lighter instead of a gun, thereby ensuring the gang members will be arrested for publicly gunning down an unarmed man. In Eastwood’s rendering, Kowalski’s self-sacrifice redeems the neighborhood for the Lors and other new arrivals, thereby completing the transition of the neighborhood from ethnic white to Hmong, and giving the new, non-white New Political Science, Volume 32, Number 1, March 2010