Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality (review)

Reproducing Racism is the most comprehensive study of the role of race and institutional structure in law school to date. Moore extends the well-developed concept of the gendered organization by demonstrating how organizations can be “raced” as well. What makes the study of law schools so compelling, the author shows us, is that they are raced organizations at the intersection of two powerful American institutions – education and the law. Law schools are “fundamentally connected to the political system and to the political economy of race,” and reproduce racial ideologies through legal authority.

Moore conducted two years of ethnographic research at two elite urban schools in the Midwest. “Midstate” is a public school with 16 percent minority enrollment, while “Presidential” is private, with 30 percent. Moore interviewed at length more than 50 students, as well as faculty and administrators. She attended courses, meetings of students of color organizations, and made observations at the schools.

Moore insists that we look at law schools as “totalizing invocations of [white] space.” Using Feagin’s notion of “white frame,” Moore argues that American law and legal education promote a set of ideas, emotions and actions that reproduce racial inequality. Even though the numerical presence of students of color is not small, there are few visible signs of people of color and their experiences in the law school environment. The racism that does occur in legal cases is minimized in the law classroom, as well as in extracurricular activities. Moore’s critique extends to social events planned by white students in white venues with white music.

The case law that forms the bulk of first year reading is presented as the impartial voice of authority. Cases that are racist to their core are extolled as espousing abstract neutral principles. Law schools privilege the history of abstract liberalism in American case law, where equality means treating each individual the same under the law when in fact law is often used to shore up group-based concerns protecting white power. Moore argues that this supposed neutral stance forces students to ignore the power hierarchies that exist around them, from their professors and in the law. When professors and students do address ethical, non-neutral principles, they are considered “not law.”

As a result, law students of color are forced by their surroundings to adapt a white frame, to create “the institutional conditions by which they may be successful in these spaces.” Thus they are essentially required to do more work – including the unrecognized emotional labor of dealing with subtle racist activities – than white students do. What can be done to deconstruct white space? Moore suggests that law schools begin by centering, rather than marginalizing, the experiences of people of color in the law, as well as teaching law school from a critical rather than objective standpoint.

What Moore’s book shows, perhaps unintentionally, is that the centering of the white discourse isn’t even all that invisible. There are, sadly, more examples of overt racism against law students of color (what Moore refers to as “Jim Crow racism”) in Moore’s book than there are examples of the less visible kind. Of course, it is difficult to see the subtle type of bias when is so deeply embedded in the law. However, because that is exactly Moore’s point, one might have wished for more examples of how professors teach the alleged objectivity and neutral stance. She provides two classroom examples in Chapter 2 and two in Chapter 3, all from constitutional law classes during the first year. But law professors don’t always teach the objectivity of the law, and do discuss indeterminacy with their students. Students do come to see the indeterminacy of the law but are perhaps not skilled enough at understanding it during law school to see how it privileges whiteness (as well as upper class, masculine and heterosexual frames). I would also be interested to know...