RACE (3) (JLH200)

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist warns us to be suspicious of the notion that American history is a spiral in progress. He says that history is more like a boomerang, which if not watched closely will return and strike us with much force and violence. This course aims to take Ellison's warning to heart and to bring law and history into a dialogue about race in the United States. More specifically, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anti-discrimination law in an effort to explore how that body of law has been shaped by social, political, and intellectual currents in United States history. The syllabus is constructed around three historical flashpoints: the early history of the Constitution, the era of Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era. Readings include equal protection cases from Plessy v. Ferguson, through Brown v. Board of Education, to Missouri v. Jenkins, as well as articles by historians and legal scholars such as John Locke, James Madison, Edmund Morgan, Gunnar Myrdal, Manning Marable, Eric Foner, Patricia Williams, and Derrick Bell. The final weeks of the course are spent placing recent developments in anti-discrimination law in a broader historical context. Paper option.