Justice at War: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights During Times of Crisis

Introduction

Introduction WHO IS RODRIGO? What about his mentor and straight man, “the Professor”? And, what are law professors doing writing stories, anyway? The reader curious about these matters will find answers to most of them in the dialogs themselves. Written simply and with as little jargon as possible, they are intended to be accessible and engaging to the general reader interested in critical race theory, politics, and American public life. But for the reader who wishes a little reassurance in this respect, or just a bit of background before diving into this book, here is a brief overview of where we will be going over the course of the next two hundred pages and about eighteen months of my characters’ lives. Rodrigo Crenshaw, my brash, gifted alter ego, is a young Italian-educated man of color in the early stages of a law teaching career. When I first introduce him to an American audience, Rodrigo has just returned to his homeland at the recommendation of his half-sister, famed civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, to seek out “the Professor.” The son of an African American serviceman and an Italian mother, Rodrigo is born in the United States but raised in Italy when his father, Lorenzo, is assigned to an outpost there. Rodrigo graduates from the base high school, then attends an Italian university and law school (“the oldest one in the world, Professor”) on government scholarships, graduating second in his class. Rodrigo seeks advice from the narrator, a grizzled veteran of many civil rights struggles and in the final years of his teaching career. The young man is thinking of returning to the United States and enrolling in an LL.M. (graduate law) program in preparation for a law teaching career of his own. Despite their age difference, the two become good friends, discussing standardized testing, the U.S. racial scene, love, empathy , the economics of race and discrimination, human cloning, and 1 many other topics over the course of the next few years. The reader learns about Giannina, Rodrigo’s great love, and follows his career as he progresses through his coursework and first teaching position. The reader also meets Laz Kowalsky (“Laz”), Rodrigo’s best friend on the faculty, a young conservative who is as far to the right politically as Rodrigo is to the left, but just as audacious and brilliant. In this book, the reader learns what two intellectuals of color think about, what worries them, and what gives them joy. He or she learns what race and racism seem like from the perspective of two characters who, despite high occupational status, are nevertheless frequently caught in discrimination’s grasp. He or she follows one of them as he falls, to his great surprise, madly in love. The two discuss issues in the news—globalism, international terrorism, and the current wave of conservatism that is sweeping the land. But they also discuss ones the average reader might not have thought about, at least not in quite the same way—formalism and lawyers’ discontents, hate speech, and the black-white binary paradigm of race. They discuss interracial attraction and whether a minority person who marries a Caucasian is guilty of bad politics. They ponder the recent spate of books that deal with the racial IQ gap. Are minorities less smart than whites? What is the role of law in the construction of human intelligence? Why are most American whites prosperous and minorities poor? Is the explanation genetic? Cultural ? Why do the wider vistas opened by the civil rights revolution not lead to greater upward mobility for blacks and Latinos? Does a form of cultural DNA cause social relations to replicate themselves, generation after generation, and if so, what is the mechanism of that replication? Does the left bear any responsibility for the current dreary racial scene? Like its predecessors, the current volume is an example of legal storytelling , a genre of scholarship pioneered by critical race theorists Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, and myself. With this volume, I expand that approach to subjects other than race. As the reader will see, the interplay of different voices and viewpoints allows for the probing exploration of complex issues while avoiding the dry-as-dust quality that afflicts much legal writing. I hope the reader finds Rodrigo as engaging as I did as author. He came into my life at a time when I was in transition, just as American law—indeed Western civilization generally—is today. In reflecting on these...