Wendy Leo Moore

Maneuvers of Whiteness: ‘Diversity’ as a Mechanism of Retrenchment in the Affirmative Action Discourse

Through a discourse analysis of three textual sources within elite law schools, we suggest that the white racial frame and the diversity construct are key mechanisms in the process of stalling racial reform by imposing tacit boundaries around the discourse surrounding progressive racial policies. We contend that this limits their effectiveness, resulting in the retrenchment of white racial privilege and power and that this happens without any explicit expression of racial animosity by whites participating in the discourse. To illustrate this process, we analyze the discourse concerning affirmative action, a policy designed to end racial discrimination in and redistribute resources related to employment and education. We focus on the institutional setting of elite law schools both because of its socializing influence on those who will make and interpret affirmative action law and because it represents an institution in which the policy may be utilized in student selection and faculty hiring.

The Legal Alchemy of White Domination: Embedding White Logic in Equal Protection Law

The U.S. Constitution, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states that no person shall be denied the equal protection of the law. Despite this Constitutional protection, however, the United States remains structured by deep racial inequality. Human rights advocates have suggested that this contradiction stems from unwillingness on the part of the U.S. government to go beyond equal protection of the law and provide state protection for a broader scope of human rights such as economic and cultural rights. Although this criticism of U.S. law and policy is warranted, I suggest even the notion of U.S. commitment to equal protection of the law must be critically interrogated given this country’s history of white racial domination. Through an explication of the equal protection jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, I illustrate how the Court has embedded within the equal protection legal frame a postcivil rights racial logic, particularly tropes of black criminality and white innocence. In doing so, the Court has constructed a substantive legal definition of equal protection of the law that naturalizes and supports contemporary mechanisms and structures of white racial domination.

The Stare Decisis of Racial Inequality: Supreme Court Race Jurisprudence and the Legacy of Legal Apartheid in the United States

More than a generation after the civil rights movement, racial inequality persists as a defining characteristic of United States social structure. Scholars from across the political spectrum have discussed and debated the causes of persistent racial inequality, offering various interpretations. Yet in the work of these otherwise different scholars, there is a consistent theme – the post civil rights era is an era of ‘formal legal equality’. Employing a method of structurally situated critical discourse analysis comparing Supreme Court race jurisprudence in the Post-Civil War and the post-Civil Rights Eras, this article interrogates this deployment of the concept of formal equality. The analysis reveals that in both eras the Supreme Court utilizes a discursive frame that asserts the position of formal legal equality, yet simultaneously employs narrative moves that ignore social structural mechanisms of racial inequality. The result is a legacy of legal framing that deploys an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ as a mechanism to protect white privilege, power, and wealth.

Reflexivity, power, and systemic racism

Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmonds call for reflexivity in race scholarship represents a critically important intervention in the project of creating social knowledge about race and racial ine...

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

ABSTRACT In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.

Red Pill Hangovers, Covert Racism, and the Sociological Machine

the globalizing processes underway. Like Hall, these approaches also advocate ‘‘thinking beyond’’ the nation-state, but generally proceed with greater attentiveness to traditional questions of how power is concentrated and wielded by identifiable social groups and actors. As pertinent examples, one might mention the important research that has been carried out on the formation and growing consolidation of a ‘‘transnational capitalist class’’ by the sociologists Leslie Sklair (2001) and William I. Robinson (2004); or the attempts to explicate the ascendancy of financial capital and its leading banking and investment representatives, as in recently published studies by the historical sociologist Greta Krippner (2011) and the political economists Leo Panitch and Sam Ginden (2012). Hall’s innovative and sometimes difficult reflections on ‘‘modernity’s empire’’ would have gained in both clarity and substance had he opted to articulate his positions in reference to alternative sociologies of globalism, whether in criticism or affirmation. Important books are commonly lauded for their dual capacity to illuminate the topical domains they explore and to open up new vistas and challenges for future investigations. Hall’s latest contribution is such a book. If not the ‘‘last word’’ on the subject of prophesied anticipations of the ‘‘end of days’’—and such was not its intention— Apocalypse has unquestionably succeeded in bringing greater awareness and comprehension to the momentously consequential role of apocalypticism in the making and breaking of worlds, past and present . . . and possibly future. Having garnered one major accolade already—the ASA 2010 Distinguished Book Award in the Religion Section—this learned and provocative study will long remain central in the discussions to follow.