University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class Volume 1 | Issue 1 Article 4 What is a Community? Group Rights and The Constitution: The pS ecial Case of African Americans Taunya Lovell Banks
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/rrgc Part of the Fourth Amendment Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons Recommended Citation Taunya L. Banks, What is a Community? Group Rights and The Constitution: The Special Case of African Americans, 1 U. Md. L.J. Race Relig. Gender & Class 51 (2001). Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/rrgc/vol1/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. WHAT IS A COMMUNITY? GROUP RIGHTS AND THE CONSTITUTION: THE SPECIAL CASE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS TAUNYA LOVELL BANKS* "We are born into certain groups, others we choose, and still others choose us. Lifie,] not subject to the call of groupness,] is as difficult for us to imagine as life not subject to the individuatingcall ofpersonhood or to the sociatingcall of sociality. "I INTRODUCTION In 1992 after a woman reported that she had been robbed in her home by a young black man, police officers in the predominately white upstate New York town of Oneonta tried to "locate and question" every African American or "black" 2 man in the town.