Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law
Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law
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Abstract
This book offers original readings of the ideal of colorblindness in canonical cases to the critical study of race and law. It does this by deconstructing and tracing colorblindness as a fantasmatic core around which law enforces classic principles of American democracy – including, equal protection, citizenship, personal privacy, and freedom of expression. This fantasmatic core, variously materialized in the formal literary structure of universal legal reason, reveals how racial slavery continues to haunt American democracy. This reading of colorblindness critically revises current debates that generally take the contemporary “post-civil rights” moment as an incontrovertible sign of colorblindness’s hegemony. Arguing that colorblindness is more than the law’s failed recognitions of the social reality of racial inequality, or a structure of the law’s formal function as objective arbiter of political struggles, the book moves beyond these constructivist and historicist discussions to explore colorblindness as the symptomatic production of law around the Real of racial slavery and black freedom struggle. Opening up a space to encounter the many instances of the continued arrival of the Real of race in law’s language, this book argues that the black radical tradition’s questions of abolition and freedom continue to be essential for developing a critical knowledge of race and law.
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