Synopses & Reviews
In 1997, Chief Justice John Roberts provocatively stated in the school discrimination case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Letters of the Law presents a multilayered case against this notion of colorblindness in American jurisprudence. Author Sora Han argues that colorblindness is a cultural fantasy, and one that interprets racism as a problem of individual or collective behaviorwhen in fact it is structural and an enduring presence within the law that cannot and should not be ignored.
Letters of the Law exposes how colorblindness is an essential psychical structure of modern legal subject-formation, and explores the ensuing dilemma of the representability of race. By analyzing and providing close readings of various Supreme Court cases in which racial justice is at issue before the lawfrom Japanese internment to affirmative action, from slave codes to prisoner rights, from Jim Crow segregation to criminal procedurethis book argues that colorblindness is an essential feature of how the law reproduces itself textually, how people come to understand themselves as legal subjects, and how the imagined community instituted by the rule of law sustains its multiracial identity as a nation. In other words: the law asks us to be colorblind, and the nation falls short or resists. Han argues that this foundational and symbolic back and forth is the cultural practice that defines the American rule of law, which is ultimately problematic in that race is never fully represented in the law.
Review
"A stunning inquiry into the racial haunt of the law, Letters of the Law is a rare example of that ornery beast we call 'interdisciplinary scholarship.' In this compelling and beautiful work, Han proves that the time of slavery is with us still."Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt, author of The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons
Review
"Letters of the Law offers a profoundly engaged and sensitive reading of critical race theory. It illuminates not only the foundational antagonism of American lawbetween racism and equal rightsbut also displaces the widely-accepted notion that racial disproportionality is the 'ur-fact of racial inequality.' Han has re-instantiated critical race theory as fundamental to any understanding of the law."Fred Moten, UC Riverside
Review
"Han proposes reading practices that enable us to counter law's injunction against imagination so that we can glimpse the camouflaged memories of slavery and freedom struggles that have become the foundational dream world of the law. Herein, she deftly argues, resides our hope to transform law and the manifold social hierarchies it protects and reproduces."Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Synopsis
This book is a deconstruction of the fantasy of colorblindness founding American law.
Synopsis
One of the hallmark features of the post-civil rights United States is the reign of colorblindness over national conversations about race and law. But how, precisely, should we understand this notion of colorblindness in the face of enduring racial hierarchy in American society? In
Letters of the Law, Sora Han argues that colorblindness is a foundational fantasy of law that not only informs individual and collective ideas of racebut also structures the imaginative capacities of American legal interpretation. Han develops a critique of colorblindness by deconstructing the law's central doctrines on due process, citizenship, equality, punishment and individual liberty, in order to expose how racial slavery and the ongoing struggle for abolition continue to haunt the law's reliance on the fantasy of colorblindness.
Letters of the Law provides highly original readings of iconic Supreme Court cases on racial inequality spanning Japanese internment to affirmative action, policing to prisoner rights, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom. Han's analysis provides readers with new perspectives on many urgent social issues of our time, including mass incarceration, educational segregation, state intrusions on privacy, and neoliberal investments in citizenship. But more importantly, Han compels readers to reconsider how the diverse legacies of civil rights reform archived in American law might be rewritten as a heterogeneous practice of black freedom struggle.
About the Author
Sora Y. Han is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at University of California, Irvine.