* Copyright (c) 1999 by Reginald Leamon Robinson. Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law. B.A. (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Howard University (1981); M.A. (Political Science), University of Chicago (1983); Exchange Scholar (Political Science and Economics), Yale University (1984–85); J.D., University of Pennsylvania (1989); Ph.D. Candidate (Political Science), University of Chicago (1993). I would like to offer thanks to Elizabeth Irene Lopez, Ph.D., for our many discussions, her insights, encouragement, and critical feedback. Of course, the politics and errata belong exclusively to me.
1 Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination 18 (1978).
2 Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics 114 (1980) (citing Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 58 (1958)).
3 Id. at 117.
4 See Janet E. Helms, Introduction: Review of Racial Identity Terminology, in Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice 3, 7 (Janet E. Helms ed., 1990) [hereinafter Black and White Racial Identity] (“Racial consciousness refers to the awareness that (socialization due to) racial-group membership can influence one’s intrapsychic dynamics as well as interpersonal relationships. Thus, one’s racial awareness may be subliminal and not readily admitted into consciousness or it may be consciousness and not readily repressed.”).
5 See, e.g., Patricia Raybon, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness 2 (1996) (“And I thought my soul would die from [hating]. [Hate] was killing me anyway—this race-focused consciousness—because it confined my spirit and my vision and sanity too. And I felt pathological—as confused and mixed up as some white sociologists have always claimed African Americans naturally are.”).
6 See Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line 35 (1993) (“I realize that race and racism are not living organisms. But they have, besides an impersonal, institutional form, a quality of fretful aliveness, an active agency, that I seek to capture.”).
7 Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution 112–13 (3d ed. 1996) (Experiment subjects only saw cards for which their “previous experience had equipped them. Yet once experience had provided the requisite additional categories, they were able to see all anomalous cards on the first inspection long enough to permit an identification.”); R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience 21 (1968) (“The ‘inner,’ then, is our personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world: imagination, dreams, fantasy, and beyond that to even further reaches of experiences.”).
8 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 118 (Nan-in, a Zen master during the Meiji era, met with a professor who wished to learn about Zen, and after filling the professor’s tea cup until it overflowed, Nan-in defined an expert by stating: “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”).
9 Cf. Ronald M. Epstein, Mindful Practice, 282 JAMA 833, 834 (1999) (“‘We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.’ . . . All data . . . are interpreted by the clinician to make sense of them and apply them to clinical practice. Experts [unconsciously] take into account messy details, such as context, cost, convenience, and the values of the patient.”) (footnotes omitted).
10 Cf. The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida 14 (John D. Caputo ed., 1997) (“[I]n the book called The Other Heading . . . identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity different from itself, having an opening or gap within itself. That totally affects a structure, but it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself.”) (citation omitted).
11 On this panel, Professor Leslie Espinoza (Boston College) played several vitally important roles: organizer, moderator, and panelist. The remaining panelists were Professors Shuba Ghosh (Georgia State), Cheryl Harris (UCLA), Twila Perry (Rutgers-Newark), Deborah Post (Touro), Frank Valdes (Miami), Leland Ware (St. Louis), and Fred Yen (Boston College).
12 See K. Anthony Appiah, Race, Culture, and Identity: Misunderstood Connections, in K. Anthony Appiah & Amy Gutmann, Color Consciousness: The Political Morality of Race 34–38 (1996) (under an ideational theory of race, people cannot learn, use, or know what “race” means without the use of either strict or vague criteria).
13 Cf. Rebecca S. Bigler et al., Social Categorization and the Formation of Intergroup Attitudes in Children, 68 Child Development 530, 530 (1997) (“Intergroup prejudice and discrimination have been found to emerge very early in childhood. Negative intergroup attitudes about gender and race are exhibited by the majority of Euro-American children by the age of 3 or 4.”) (citations omitted).
14 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 118. According to Baker Roshi, the American Zen Master, the “mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities.” See id.
15 See id.
16 Cf. Norman Denzin, The New Ethnography, 27 J. Contemp. Ethnography 405, 411 (1998) (arguing that the ethnographer who relies on the “lived experience” model operates within the social and power context that organizes knowledge and experiences, and to this extent, the ethnographer shapes reality and representations by the degree to which this context informs what she knows and how she came by her experiences).
17 See Rollo May, The Courage to Create 22 (1994) (Artists “live out their imagination. The symbols only dreamt about by most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists.”).
18 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 118–19.
19 See Juan F. Perea, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The “Normal Science” of American Racial Thought, 10 La Raza L.J. 127, 128 (1998) (“This [racist] paradigm shapes our understanding of what race and racism mean and the nature of our discussions about race. It is crucial, therefore, to identify and describe this paradigm and to demonstrate how it binds and organizes racial discourse, limiting both the scope and the range of legitimate viewpoints in that discourse.”).
20 I do not apply this point perforce to all minorities. Regardless, each person is plagued by race thinking, and each of us knows that some blacks blame others for their experiences. See Harlon L. Dalton, Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks and Whites 149–50 (1995) (explaining that some people become locked in the role of victim, others consciously use it for their own ends, and others put their victimization behind them). Yet my point parallels what Race Crits have said about white unconscious racism. See Charles Lawrence III, Id, Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, in Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed a Movement 235 (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw et al. eds., 1995) [hereinafter CRT: Key Writings]. Whites and blacks have shared histories, and thus blacks differ little from whites. Some blacks self-consciously subscribe to a victims theory; most blacks suffer unconsciously from inferiority, believing that whites will counter their best effort to succeed. Thus they can inevitably create self-fulfilling prophecies. See id. at 237 (“To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, we are all racists. At the same time, most of us are unaware of our racism.”). I do not argue that whites—individuals or institutions—are not actually erecting discriminatory barriers. How minorities might experience those barriers as either insurmountable or conquerable perhaps turns on how they perceive who they are: impotent victims or powerful agents?
21 See generally Reginald Leamon Robinson, The Racial Limits of the Fair Housing Act: The Intersection of Dominant White Images, the Violence of Neighborhood Purity, and the Master Narrative of Black Inferiority, 37 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 69 (1995); Reginald Leamon Robinson, “The Other Against Itself”: Deconstructing the Violent Discourse Between Korean and African Americans, 67 S. Cal. L. Rev. 15 (1993).
22 Compare to Psalms 82:6 (King James) (“Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”).
23 See generally Derrick Bell, Foreword: The Civil Rights Chronicles, 99 Harv. L. Rev. 4 (1985).
24 In fact, blacks have argued that, notwithstanding race, they should attain the same constitutional protections as any citizen (e.g., right to marry). See generally, e.g., Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967).
25 See I Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue 102 (1996). (“You cannot resist something to which you grant no reality. The act of resisting a thing is the act of granting it life. When you resist any energy, you place it there. The more you resist, the more you make it real—whatever you are resisting.”).
26 See Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice 62 (rev. ed. 1991) (discussing the unwillingness to challenge categorical or dialectical thinking as a category in order to protect its sovereignty: “[t]hat way lies madness”).
27 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 119 (arguing that visionary people expose illusion and live in lonely places, and, by so doing, are seen as heretics, nonsensical, and mad; nevertheless, the visionary stands by her views, not out of stubbornness, but out of certainty that she can share this vision meaningfully); May, supra note 17, at 20 (“[B]oth solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.”).
28 See Dalton, supra note 20, at 153 (“[T]here are lots of very successful Black folk running around. How have they managed to make it? . . . [H]asn’t considerable progress been made on the institutional level? . . . Meanwhile, raw bigotry is out of fashion . . . . Is racism less of a barrier than we think?”).
29 See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, in CRT: Key Writings, supra note 20, at 103, 110 (“Black people do not create their oppressive worlds moment to moment but rather are coerced into living in worlds created and maintained by others; moreover, the ideological source of this coercion is not liberal legal consciousness but racism.”).
30 See Dalton, supra note 20, at 157 (arguing that blacks must examine how slavery continues to affect their lives and why today’s black communities do not thrive as they did in a harsher past); see generally Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1999).
31 See, e.g., Laing, supra note 7, at 17 (Social phenomenological “study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is interexperience.”); Paul Wachtel, Race in the Mind of America: Breaking the Vicious Circle Between Blacks and Whites (1999) 6–15 (discussing the intersection of personality theory, experiences, and victimization); Thomas M. Vander Ven, Fear of Victimization and the Interactional Construction of Harassment in a Latino Neighborhood, 27 J. Contemp. Ethnography 374, 377 (1998) (“[W]hen one pedestrian fears another, the fearful pedestrian sometimes communicates feelings of vulnerability by using overt avoidance techniques or by acting demonstrably cautious. When actors communicate fear through pure avoidance or demonstrative caution, the feared individual may respond by acting in a threatening or dangerous manner.”).
32 See, e.g., Kathy Russell et al., Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans 75 (1993); Bigler et al., supra note 13, at 532 (discussing multiple classification skills of children between the ages of six and nine).
33 See Russell et al., supra note 32, at 74 (“Although [the one-drop rule] had its origin in racism, today the rule is staunchly defended by most members of the Black community. By definition, the one-drop rule unites all those with Black ancestry.”).
34 Cf. Joseph Owens, Cognition: An Epistemological Inquiry 8 (1992) (noting, in discussing David Hume, that it is “‘Custom or Habit’ that ‘makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.’”).
35 See Jean Finot, Race Prejudice, reprinted in Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke 75–80 (S.T. Joshi ed., 1998) [hereinafter Documents of American Prejudice]. Originally published in 1905 in La Préjugé des Races, Finot’s works did much to dismantle the “scientific” foundation of racism. Finot aptly writes that if one analyzes the successive theories of racial inequality, one finds faithful adherents with fixed minds, and this erroneous thinking gets compounded by faithful, successive generations. See id. at 75. Yet, this dogma of inequality deeply roots itself in non-science no less than the view that the sun circled the earth. See id.
36 See Alan Wolfe, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996, The New Republic, July 7, 1997, at 32 (“The notion of black inferiority triumphed among liberals, especially those who thought that they were advancing the cause of racial equality. Unlike conservatives, liberals did not believe that African Americans were unlike the rest of their countryman in any innate sense. . . . Liberals [relied on an image of damaged blacks] ... to invoke not solidarity, but pity. And pity, when it is well-intentioned, is never far from contempt.”).
37 See, e.g., Charles Benedict Davenport, The Effects of Race Intermingling, in Documents of American Prejudice, supra note 35, at 81–84.
38 See Russell et al., supra note 32, at 74 (“The answer to all these questions is rooted in the one-drop rule of racial identity, which, more than any other factor, has shaped the development of racial identity in America.”).
39 See Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property, in CRT: Key Writings, supra note 20, at 276, 283 (“The law assumed the crucial task of racial classification, and accepted . . . race as biological fact. This core precept . . . allowed the law to fulfill an essential function, parceling out status according to race, facilitating systemic discrimination based apparently on racial group membership.”).
40 See generally, e.g., George M. Fredrickson, Black Images in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1972).
41 See Appendix to Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law 11 (Philip B. Kurland & Gerhard Casper eds., 1975). The authors of this appendix pointed out that on April 7, 1864, Senator Hendricks of Indiana endorsed Senator Saulsbury’s remarks about slavery. See id. According to Senator Saulsbury, “Congress should leave the institution of slavery as it was, and not tamper with the will of God.” Id. Like Senator Saulsbury, Senator Hendricks argued that blacks “will never associate with . . . white[s on] . . . equal [terms]. . . . [I]t may be legislated for . . . . [B]ut there is that difference between the two races that renders it impossible. If they are among us as a free people, they are among us as an inferior people.” Id.
42 See generally Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956).
43 See Re Negro Cesar, 31 Md. Arch. 34, June 1754 (“Justices . . having passed Sentence of Death . . . against Negro Cesar the Slave of Walter Dulany and Tom the Slave of Margaret Gaither for assaulting Duncan Robertson and Mary Suttor . . in the Night . . and . . Carrying away . . Sundry Effects . . Ordered that Death Warrants issue.”); Re Negro Jonathan, 32 Md. Arch. 158, Aug. 1766 (“Negro Jonathan and negro George had been convicted of robbing houses. Further information was sought. The justices replied: ‘we sincerely wish it was in Our Power to say any thing in favour of these unhappy People, they have broke Goal.’ ‘Ordered that Death Warrant issue.’”), reprinted in IV Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro 39, 46 (Helen Tunnicliff Catterall & James J. Hayden eds., 1968).
44 See, e.g., Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America xiii-xiv (1992) (“Racism teaches whites to feel that black people are sexually dirty. . . . [B]lack people . . . threat[en] . . . white racial purity. . . . Sexual ‘intermingling’ . . . exacerbates this reaction to an unbearable degree, resulting in violent feelings and acts against trespassers across the invisible and not so invisible ‘do not cross’ barriers between race and sex.”); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, in On Lynchings 4 (August Meier ed., 1969) (“Nobody . . . believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”).
45 163 U.S. 537 (1896) (Brown, J., majority).
46 109 U.S. 3 (1883) (Bradley, J., majority).
47 See generally W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 670–710 (1962); see also id. at 670 (“[T]he civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was . . . determined . . . to reduce black labor . . . to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro worker . . . was . . . reduced to . . . bare subsistence by . . . every method of discrimination.”).
48 See Juan Williams, The Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, at 36–45 (1987).
49 See, e.g., John Calmore, Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World, in CRT: Key Writings supra note 20, at 315, 325 (“White racism results, in part, from cultural conditioning that reinforces and in turn is reinforced by the particular actions of interest groups. Institutional arrangements are organized and manipulated by power holders in our political economy with the aim of securing maximum social control and selective privilege.”).
50 See Finot, supra note 35, at 76 (“The science of inequality is emphatically a science of white people. It is they who have invented it. . . . Deeming themselves greater than men of other colours, they have elevated into superior qualities all the traits which are peculiar to themselves, commencing with [their white skin] and [pliant] hair.”).
51 See, e.g., Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism 10 (1992) (explaining Professor Jennifer Hochschild’s findings that the continued viability of racism demonstrates that racism shapes and energizes the liberal democratic body and that liberal democracy and racism in the United States are historically reinforcing); Janet E. Helms, Toward a Model of White Racial Identity Development, in Black and White Racial Identity, supra note 4, at 49 (“Because [individual, institutional, and social] racism is so much a part of the cultural milieu, each can become a part of the White person’s identity or consciousness ipso facto.”).
52 See, e.g., Dalton, supra note 20, at 168–69 (“We need to describe the effects of racism and discrimination on our daily lives. We need to describe its effect on our psyches. I still wince at the internalized self-hatred reflected in the ways we used to chide each other when I was growing up. Put-downs such as: ‘Niggers and flies. Niggers and flies. The more I see niggers, the more I like flies.’”).
53 See generally Reginald Leamon Robinson, Race Consciousness: A Mere Means to Prevent Escape from Her White Masters. An Allegorical Essay, 15 Touro L. Rev. 401 (1999).
54 See, e.g., Henry Louis Gates & Nellie Y. McKay, Preface: Talking Books, in The Norton Anthology: African American Literature xxviii (Henry Louis Gates & Nellie Y. McKay eds., 1997) (citing James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince (1770)) (“[My Master] used to read prayers in public. . . . [T]he book talk to my master. . . . [W]hen nobody saw me, I opened it, ... and [was] greatly disappointed . . . . [I]t would not speak. . . . [E]very body and every thing despised me because I was black.”).
55 See generally, e.g., Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1968).
56 See generally Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1976).
57 See generally Robinson, supra note 53.
58 See generally Kenneth B. Clark, The Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1967).
59 See Crenshaw, supra note 29, at 117 (arguing that race consciousness encourages whites to imagine and identify with a white world and privileged elites: “Consider the . . . dirt-poor, southern white . . . in a Ku Klux Klan rally in the movie Resurgence, who declared: ‘Every morning, I wake up and thank God I am white.’”).
60 See generally Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia (1781), reprinted in Stephen B. Presser & Jamil S. Zainaldin, Law and Jurisprudence in American History 116–29 (3d ed. 1995).
61 See generally Derrick Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law 179–96 (1992) (discussing, among other things, white primaries and poll taxes); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (1989).
62 See generally, e.g., Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903) (voter registration requirements in Alabama Constitution were designed to have the effect of excluding blacks, though the exclusion was not per se); Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960) (racial gerrymandering in Tuskegee, Alabama).
63 See Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880).
64 See generally Casteñeda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482 (1977).
65 See Dyson, supra note 6, at 37–39 (discussing the “mountain of evidence” when analyzing race as pretext and arguing that evidence does not exist in a vacuum but must be analyzed to explain, as examples, the verdict in the Rodney King incident and O.J. Simpson case); Nikol G. Alexander & Drucilla Cornell, Dismissed or Banished? A Testament to the Reasonableness of the Simpson Jury, in Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case 57, 59 (Toni Morrison & Claudia Brodsky Lacour eds., 1997) (“[W]e challenge the popular consensus amongst white Americans that the O.J. jury knowingly let a guilty man go free because the majority of the jurors were blacks and blacks will simply not usually convict other blacks.”).
66 See generally White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (Joe L. Kincheloe et al. eds., 1988); Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (Cameron McCarthy & Warren Crichlow eds., 1993).
67 See generally, e.g., California Teachers Assoc. v. Davis, 64 F. Supp.2d 945 (C.D. Cal. 1999) (unsuccessful challenge by public school teachers of a California statute which imposed personal liability for violation of English-only education law); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (1988).
68 See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 552 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting) (“The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.”).
69 See Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory 93–94 (1984).
70 See id. at 211–12 (defining metaracism as “[r]acism, which began with the random oppression of another person, and moved from directly dominative, systematic control of his being, into abstracted averted use of the degradation . . .”).
71 See generally Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass 94 (1994) (“White apprehensions about racial mixing are associated with the belief that having black neighbors undermines property values and reduces neighborhood safety.”).
72 See generally id. at 74–78 (defining hypersegregation as dependent on five dimensions—unevenness, isolation, clusteredness, concentration, and centralization—and arguing that “[n]ot only are blacks more segregated than other groups on any single dimension of segregation, but they are also more segregated on all dimensions simultaneously”).
73 See Kuhn, supra note 7, at 191 (“[L]earning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use. . . . [W]hat results from this process is ‘tacit knowledge’ which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.”); cf. Epstein, supra note 9, at 833 (“Explicit knowledge is readily taught, accessible to awareness, quantifiable and easily translated into evidence-based guidelines. Tacit knowledge is usually learned during observation and practice, including prior experiences, theories-in-action, and deeply held values, and is usually applied more inductively.”).
74 See generally Burch v. La Petite Academy, Inc. (visited Feb. 1, 2000) [hereinafter Plaintiff’s Complaint].
75 Dara Jones, age 15; Dale Jones, age 13; Dana Jones, age 10; Deseree Jones, age 9; and Laythatcher Jones, age 15. See id. at ¶ 9.
76 Plaintiff’s Complaint, supra note 74, at ¶ 28.
77 Id. at ¶ 30.
78 Id. at ¶ 35; see generally Bigler et al., supra note 13, at 539 (“[S]ocial categories do not become the basis of children’s stereotypes solely as a function of their perceptual salience. Rather, the functional use of a social category appears to be an important facilitator of the development of intergroup stereotypes.”).
79 See Helms, supra note 51, at 54 (“[S]ignificant persons in one’s life (e.g., media, parents, peers) inform one of the existence of Blacks as well as how one ought to think about them.”). Helms explains, “[S]ignificant White persons in one’s environment may use the socialization pressures available to them to ensure that the White persons learn the rules of being socially accepted White persons.” Id.
80 See Dalton, supra note 20, at 156 (“[S]lavery . . . shape[s] our lives more than a century after abolition [through]the link it forged between Blackness and inferiority to this day. . . . It does not matter that contemporary Black folk were not personally enslaved so long as we carry the stigmata of those who were—dark skin.”); Cornel West, Race Matters 20 (1994) (“[P]eople, especially degraded and oppressed people, are also hungry for identity, meaning, and self-worth.”).
81 See generally, e.g., Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States 1790–1860 (1961).
82 See Five Heartbeats (Twentieth Century Fox 1997).
83 See Helms, supra note 51, at 54 (“[S]ignificant persons in one’s life (e.g., media, parents, peers) inform one of the existence of Blacks as well as how one ought to think about them.”).
84 Cf. James A. Beane & Richard P. Lipka, Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, and the Curriculum 18 (1986) (“Educators who work with young children are well aware that when children first come to school they already have feelings and beliefs about themselves in terms of adequacy and competency. . . . In other words, from the very first experiences in life, young children begin to develop a sense of themselves.”).
85 See generally Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1993).
86 See Walsch, supra note 25, at 103 (“Yet never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant it more firmly in place. Have I told you all thought is creative?”) (emphasis in original).
87 See Taunya Lovell Banks, Two Life Stories: Reflections of One Black Woman Law Professor, in CRT: Key Writings, supra note 20, at 329.
88 See, e.g., Clarence Page, Showing My Color: Biracial Kids Face Burdens of Two Worlds, Hous. Chron., Mar. 14, 1996, at 1 (“Black Americans who have internalized white supremacist attitudes and values become agents of those attitudes and values, enforcing them in others and passing them on to new generations more effectively than the Ku Klux Klan ever could.”).
89 Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice 142–43 (1984).
90 Id. For examples of how we permit dominant paradigms about race to shape our knowledge, and thus our consciousness, of who we might be, see Banks, supra note 87, at 331 (discussing an event when a white woman refused to enter into the elevator after she saw that five black females were already riding it down and how she felt injured by what she thought this white woman’s refusal meant); Jennifer M. Russell, On Being a Gorilla in Your Midst, or, The Life of One Blackwoman in the Legal Academy, in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge 429–502 (Richard Delgado ed., 1995) (discussing how she felt after an unknown person placed a magazine with a gorilla’s picture on the cover in her mailbox).
91 See West, supra note 80, at 18 (“[W]e must acknowledge that structures and behavior are inseparable, that institutions and values go hand in hand. How people act and live are shaped—though in no way dictated or determined—by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves.”).
92 Cf. Denzin, supra note 16, at 410 (“Such a commitment presumes a world out there that is mapped (described) by an ethnographer who stands on the border between reality, lived experience and its representation. But the ethnographer is part and parcel of the experience. . . . The crisis of representation . . . says we inscribe, not describe, reality.”).
93 See Yolanda Y. Adams, Don’t Want to Be Black Anymore (Dark-Skinned African American Feels More Comfortable with Caucasians), Essence, Aug. 1999, at 54 (“Though my skin color veers toward the dark end . . . . I have never been Black enough to satisfy some. I was often taunted for being ‘proper’ or ‘acting White’. . . . She wouldn’t allow split infinitives. . . . She also forbade me to think less of myself. . . . [S]he encouraged me to do just the opposite.”).
94 See generally Christopher Jencks & Meredith Phillips, The Black-White Test Score Gap: How to Reduce It, Current, Jan. 1999, at 7. (“The number of affluent black parents has grown substantially since the 1960s, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families. Income inequality between blacks and whites appears to play some role in the test score gap, but it is quite small.”).
95 See Lynette Clemetson, Trying to Close the Achievement Gap (African Americans Work Harder for Academic Achievement in Shaker Heights, Ohio), Newsweek, June 7, 1999, at 36 (“Then there is peer pressure. Most teens at Shaker say they do not buy the old line that doing well means selling out to white culture. ‘What, only white people study?’ says junior Justin Taylor. ‘That’s just plain stupid and insulting.’ But if students don’t catch flak for ‘acting white,’ they face mixed messages about what it means to ‘act black.’”).
96 While I was a professor at Whittier College School of Law, I had the same experience, except that it manifested itself differently. No matter what I did, my white students never put me on par with my white colleagues. I was always black, not only by what I said, but also how I acted. If I took myself seriously as an intellectual, then I was confusing, ineffective, and a poor teacher. If I adjusted my approach in response to the institutional tension in my class, then I did not proffer a sophisticated reading of the material. Or as one colleague might have put it, “I was not analytical enough.” At Whittier, I was viewed as an outgroup member; at Howard, I was viewed as someone who had forgotten that I was an outgroup member. At Whittier, I was viewed as preferring black over white. At Howard, I was acting like whitey. See generally Reginald Leamon Robinson, Teaching From the Margins: Race As A Pedagogical Sub-text, 19 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 151 (1997).
97 See Janet E. Helms, An Overview of Black Racial Identity Theory, in Black and White Racial Identity, supra note 4, at 9, 24 (“[S]tatements like ‘You talk like you’re White’ imply that the speaker has the right to judge what constitutes Black speech whereas the person addressed does not and, at the same time, that the person does not measure up to Black behavioral standards in some important way.”).
98 Drop Squad (Universal Studios 1995).
99 See generally Vander Ven, supra note 31; Shelby Steele, I’m Black, You’re White: Which of Us is Innocent?, Seattle Times, June 19, 1988, at A12.
100 See, e.g., Study Examines Race’s Powerful Role in Society, Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, Iowa), Oct. 3, 1999, at A9 (“[R]ace has a pervasive influence at many levels, manifesting itself in everything from highly segregated housing to labor markets that prefer hiring some racial groups over others.”).
101 See, e.g., id. (“In Detroit, for example, it took unskilled, unemployed whites an average of 91 hours to generate a job offer. It took blacks 167 hours.”).
102 See Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal 10 (1992) (discussing how Asians are viewed as acceptable by whites and how they get assimilated into society and economy like early immigrants).
103 See Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred 6 (1998) (“White supremacy focused white America’s group authority for three centuries before truth could even begin to catch up. Group authority is just as likely to be an expression of collective ignorance as of truth; but it is always, in a given era, more powerful than truth.”).
104 See Reginald Leamon Robinson, White Cultural Matrix and the Language of Nonverbal Advertising in Housing Segregation: Toward an Aggregate Theory of Liability, 25 Capital U. Law Rev. 101, 123–24 (1996) (“[A] white cultural matrix necessarily includes racism and white supremacy. . . . , [and it] . . . provides the germ seed for . . . white dominance, [and creates] a cultural hegemony in which every aspect of whiteness as goodness lauds over African Americans, and in which this whiteness informs every dominant aspect of American life.”) (citations omitted).
105 See, e.g., Dalton, supra note 20, at 167 (discussing a housing authority’s attempt to integrate a Ku Klux Klan stronghold in Vidor, Texas, an effort that produced cross burnings, bomb threats, etc., until only one person remained. Bill Simpson, the last to leave, returned to his neighborhood, “only to be killed by two would-be [black] robbers within twelve hours of escaping Vidor.”).
106 Cf. Julie Johnson, Science Friction (Sociology of Science Debate), New Statesman & Soc’y, Jan. 13, 1995, at 29 (“But the merest hint of relativism is anathema to scientists, many of whom believe as fervently as any fundamentalist does in their religious creed, that they are engaged in revealing, layer by layer, nature’s absolute truths.”).
107 Cf. William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, reprinted in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy: Readings from Classical and Contemporary Sources 25, 28–35 (Paul Edwards & Arthur Pap eds., 1969).
108 See Appiah, supra note 12, at 33 (“The other picture of meaning—the ‘referential’ view—suggests that to explain what the word ‘race’ means is, in effect, to identify the things to which it applies, the things we refer to when we speak of ‘races.’”).
109 See Michael H. Cohen, Fixed Star in Health Care Reform: The Emerging Paradigm of Holistic Healing, 27 Ariz. St. L.J. 79, 85–86 (1995) (“Kuhn found that those who challenge the old paradigm are either young or new to the field. Being uncommitted to the traditional rules of the old paradigm, they are more ‘likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.’”).
110 See, e.g., Stanley Fish, Fish v. Fiss, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 1325, 1332 (1984) (“To be . . . ‘deeply inside’ a context is to be already and always thinking (and perceiving) with and within the norms, standards, definitions, routines, and understood goals that both define and are defined by that context.”).
111 See generally Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950) (presenting radically and profoundly new data on world history, planetary collisions involving Earth and other planets, and astronomy).
112 See generally Immanuel Velikovsky, Stargazers and Gravediggers: Memoirs to Worlds in Collision (1983) (recounting how the established academic experts and some academic publishers politically reacted to his premises, findings, predictions, and conclusions).
113 See Kuhn, supra note 7, at 11 (“Because he there joins men who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice.”).
114 See generally Norberto Valdez & Janice Valdez, The Pot that Called the Kettle White: Changing Racial Identities and U.S. Social Construction of Race, 5 Identities 379–413 (1998).
115 See Reginald Leamon Robinson, The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez, 20 B.C. Third World L.J. ___ (forthcoming May 2000).
116 See generally, e.g., Tanya Kateri Hernandez, “Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classification in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence, 57 Md. L. Rev. 139 (1998) (arguing that advocates of the multiracial category movement ignore the political meaning of race); Linda Mathews, Beyond “Other”: More Than Identity Rides on a New Racial Category, N.Y. Times, July 6, 1996, at 1 (arguing that civil rights advocates object to multiracial categories because they will reduce the number of racial minorities, dilute voting power, and render unenforceable civil rights laws.).
117 Raybon, supra note 5, at 3.
118 Id. at 3. “White people had murdered Emmett Till and Mack Charles Parker and Medgar Evers and Herbert Lee and the four little girls in the Birmingham church. And white people had acquitted the guilty.” Id. at 3–4.
119 See Richard Delgado, Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2411, 2413 (1989) (defining mindset as a “bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings. . . . These matters are rarely focused on. They are like eyeglasses we have worn a long time. They are nearly invisible; we use them to scan and interpret the world and only rarely examine them for themselves.”).
120 See Stephen C. Wright et al., The Extended Context Effect: Knowledge of Cross-Group Friendship and Prejudice, 73 J. Personality & Soc. Psy. 73–90 (1997).
121 See, e.g., Karl Llewellyn, A Realistic Jurisprudence—The Next Step, 30 Colum. L. Rev. 431, 453 (1930) (“[A] realistic approach to any new problem would begin by skepticism as to the adequacy of the received categories for ordering the phenomena effectively toward a solution of the new problem”).
122 Cf. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (1989).
123 See generally Laing, supra note 7 (arguing that one can act only on one’s own experience of the other person’s experience).
124 See James, supra note 107, at 35–37 (discussing the interrelationship between morality and indeterminism as a basis for understanding human possibilities).
125 Cf. Steele, supra note 103, at 3–4 (“[B]lack American leaders were practicing a politics that drew the group into a victim-focused racial identity that, in turn, stifled black advancement more than racism itself did.”).
126 See Laing, supra note 7, at 37 (arguing that, as people become aware of their individual defense mechanisms and realize that they have done things to themselves, “the patient becomes an agent”).
127 Raybon, supra note 5, at 1–2.
128 Id. at 2.
129 See Kuhn, supra note 7, at 112–13.
130 See Renée Weber, Field Consciousness and Field Ethics, in The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science 35, 41 (Ken Wilber ed., 1985) (In Kantian terms, “humankind is in a bind symbolized . . . by a species universally endowed with contact lenses. Without these lenses, we cannot see [or know] at all. . . . But [with the lenses’ built-in tinted filters], we can ‘see’ only what the filters permit. Thus we see either nothing or else distortedly.”).
131 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 111 (Under Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, “there are limits beyond which we cannot measure accurately . . . the processes of nature. These limits are not imposed by . . . our measuring devices or the extremely small size of the entities that we attempt to measure, but rather by the very way nature presents itself to us.”).
132 See Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics 3 (Arkana ed. 1993) (arguing against a physical, objective world in which one neutrally observes, in which one could reach out and touch a physical object independent of what the touching person thought or did, by stating that “[w]e cannot observe the physical world, for as the new physics tell us, there is no one physical world. We participate within a spectrum of all possible realities.”). Talbot adds, “Heisenberg stated that the observer alters the observed by the mere act of observation.” Id.
133 See Norris, supra note 26, at 19.
134 See Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy 105 (1984).
135 See generally Thomas C. Grey, Holmes and Legal Pragmatism, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 787 (1989).
136 See id. at 854 (“For Dewey, the second pragmatist tenet, the culturally situated and contextual aspect of all human inquiry and deliberation, undercuts any idea that all human activity is aimed at some limited set of fixed ends.”).
137 Cf. Helms, supra note 51, at 53 (in developing a positive white consciousness, whites, for example, must address “their feelings of oppression, [must seek out] accurate information, [must discharge] feelings related to racism, and [consequently change] their attitudes and behaviors.”) (citing J. B. Karp, Emotional Impact and a Model for Changing Racist Attitudes, in Impacts of Racism on White Americans 88 (B. P. Bowser & R. G. Hunt eds., 1981)).
138 Cf. May, supra note 17, at 17 (“It is the courage to relate to other human beings, the capacity to risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness. . . . Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.”).
139 See generally William Earle, The Autobiographical Consciousness: A Philosophical Inquiry into Existence (1972).
140 See Laing, supra note 7, at xii (“We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be.”).
141 Id. at xiii.
142 Id. at 23.
143 See id.
144 See id.
145 See Laing, supra note 7, at 23.
146 See id.
147 See id.; David Bohm, Thought as a System 1 (1993) (“Everything is interdependent; and yet the more interdependent we get, the more we seem to split up into little groups that don’t like each other and are inclined to fight each other and kill each other, or at least not to cooperate.”).
148 Laing, supra note 7, at 23.
149 See id. at 24.
150 See generally Helms, supra note 51.
151 See Laing, supra note 7, at 34 (“Personal action can either open out possibilities of enriched experience or it can shut off possibilities. Personal action is either predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing, or it is invalidating, denying, discouraging, undermining and constricting. It can be creative or destructive.”).
152 Id. at 25.
153 Id.
154 Id.
155 Id.
156 See generally Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology (1983).
157 See id. at 17–18. May defines being as an individual’s “pattern of potentialities,” and he asserts that “[t]he ‘unconscious,’ then, is not to be thought of as a reservoir of impulses, thoughts, wishes which are culturally unacceptable. I define it rather as those potentialities for knowing and experiencing which the individual cannot or will not actualize.” See id. at 17. At this level, repression involves a complex struggle of a person’s being against her nonbeing possibility.
158 See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Intersectionality: Mapping the Margins of Race and Gender, in CRT: Key Writings, supra note 20, at 357, 367.
159 Cf. Owens, supra note 34, at 19–20 (“[I]t would hardly seem feasible, given the difficulties . . . of recalling one’s earliest cognition. . . . The baby would be aware of bassinet or bottle, . . . without any recognition of which was epistemologically prior. The same problem would remain, and the same means would have to be used to solve it.”).
160 See generally Robinson, supra note 53. See also Helms, supra note 51, at 49–50 (discussing how proponents of American Negro slavery used white racism to justify legal enslavement of blacks and how blacks and whites developed identities about primary outgroup and ingroup references).
161 Laing, supra note 7, at 26.
162 Id.
163 Id.
164 See id. at 27.
165 See id. at 27–28 (“[F]orms of alienation . . . are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person . . . is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation . . . are labeled by the “normal” majority as bad or mad.”).
166 See Talbot, supra note 132, at 2 (“According to Tantra, reality is illusion, or maya. The major error we commit in not perceiving this maya, say the Tantras, is that we perceive ourselves as separate from our environment. . . . The observer and objective reality are one.”).
167 Laing, supra note 7, at 27.
168 See U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204, 214–15 (1923) (“What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, . . . it does not include the [high-caste Hindus] to whom the appellee belongs.”).
169 See Crenshaw, supra note 29, at 117 (“Every morning, I wake up and thank God I’m white.”); Helms, supra note 51, at 54 (“One result of this racial status is that, as Dennis points out, even if one has few resources oneself, as long as one has White skin in America, one is entitled to feel superior to Blacks. This sense of entitlement seems to be a basic norm of White society.”) (citing R. M. Dennis, Socialization and Racism: The White Experience, in Impacts of Racism on White Americans, supra note 137, at 71–85, .
170 See Frankl, supra note 134, at 104 (“[T]his striving for meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”).
171 See Zukav, supra note 2, at 118.
172 See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks 45 (Signet Classics 1st ed. 1995).
173 See generally Steele, supra note 103, at 3–4.
174 See generally Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (1993).
175 See Dyson, supra note 6, at 33.
176 See generally 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
177 See generally 109 U.S. 3 (1993).
178 See 334 U.S. 1, 20 (1948).
179 See Helms, supra note 51, at 54 (“Vicarious awareness occurs when significant persons in one’s life (e.g., media, parents, peers) inform one of the existence of Blacks as well as how one ought to think about them. Dennis does an excellent job in describing how Whites are socialized directly and indirectly to fear and devalue Blacks.”).
180 See generally 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
181 See Dyson, supra note 6, at 35.
182 Terminator 2 (Artisan Entertainment 1991).
183 See Ronald Turner, The Dangers of Misappropriation: Misusing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Legacy to Prove the Colorblind Thesis, 2 Mich. J. Race & L. 101, 101 (1996) (“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”) (citing A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. 219 (James M. Washington ed., 1986)).
184 See Laing, supra note 7, at 30 (“[E]ach time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?”).