Resistance in the Afterlife of Identity

April 19, 2010
CUNY School of Law Auditorium

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Featuring Professor Darren Hutchinson, of American University Washington College of Law.

Professor Hutchinson traces how, throughout history, opponents of racial justice measures have invoked a discourse of "racial exhaustion" to contest equality measures and to portray the United States as a post-racist society. Professor Hutchinson examines political resistance to civil rights legislation and remedies immediately following the Civil War and during Reconstruction, after World War II and through the Cold War era, and in contemporary political and legal discourse in order to demonstrate the persistence of racial exhaustion rhetoric. He describes how social movement actors, civil rights lawyers and theorists, and scholars interested in the interaction of law and rhetoric could respond to the persistent portrayal of racial egalitarianism as redundant and unfair by dissecting the premise of these claims, placing them in an historical context, and, if necessary, by strategically modifying their arguments to focus on class and other structural barriers that correlate or intersect with racial inequality.

Professor Hutchinson's work is connected to a number of important initiatives and conversations happening in our law school community. Learn more about his work »

Follow his blog, Dissenting Justice »

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