University of Colorado Law School Colorado Law Scholarly Commons Articles Colorado Law Faculty Scholarship 2012 Race as a Legal Concept Justin Desautels-Stein University of Colorado Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles Part of the Conflict of Laws Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Race Commons, and the Legal History Commons Citation Information Justin Desautels-Stein, Race as a Legal Concept, 2 COLUM. J. RACE & L. 1 (2012), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/137. Copyright Statement Copyright protected. Use of materials from this collection beyond the exceptions provided for in the Fair Use and Educational Use clauses of the U.S. Copyright Law may violate federal law. Permission to publish or reproduce is required. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Colorado Law Faculty Scholarship at Colorado Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of Colorado Law Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. +(,121/,1( Citation: 2 Colum. J. Race & L. 1 2012 Provided by: William A. Wise Law Library Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline Tue Feb 28 10:02:56 2017 -- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License -- The search text of this PDF is generated from uncorrected OCR text. -- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope of your HeinOnline license, please use: Copyright Information 2012 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF RACE AND LAW RACE AS A LEGAL CONCEPT JUSTIN DESAUTELS-STEIN* Race is a /el cocpangie a/Il corncepts, it is a matrix of rules. Althouh tb eglcneto of race has shifted over time, up from slavey and to the present, one element in the matrix has remained the same: the background rules of race have alwajs taken a view of racialidentio as a naturalaspect of human biology. To be sure, caracteridationsof the rule have oftentimes kept pace with developments in race science, and the original invention of race as a rationalefor the subordination of certain human populations is now a rationale witi little currengy. The departurefrom this "classic liberal" conception of race, and its attendant and disturbing view of the function of race, did not, however, departfrom the idea that race is a natural and organic part of being a human being. As this Article argues, this seminal background rule that race isnatural, neutral, and necessaqa-is deepl problematic and a substantial obstacle in the fight against the Supreme Court's ascending anticlassificationjurisprudence. Not to mention, it is also false. In an effort to make some headway against the idea that race is a naturalidea, as opposed to a legal concept, the Article attacks the background rules of race via the unlikely field of Conflict of Laws. Taking the Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 as a bench6mark, the discussion first suggests an earjy functionalist view of voluntay sch ool integration by way of an analogy to the earjy twentieth)-centugy transformations occurring in Conflicts of Laws. Second, and in the alternative, the discussion then situates the facts of Parents Involved as literaly aproblem of Conflict of Laws. In both instances, the hope is to focus legal discourse on the background rules of race so as to empower a new and emancipatoiy anti-subordinationjurisprudence. Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School. I received helpful comments from Kristen Carpenter, Ming Chen, Neil Gotanda, Matthew Hughey, Sarah Krakoff, Ralf Michaels, Helen Norton, and participants at "ClassCrits IV: Criminalizing Inequality" held at Washington College of Law at American University. Jena Akin and Shannon Avery Rollert provided excellent research assistance. Special thanks to Adrienne Davis, Dwight Mullen, and Ed Katz. RACE AS A LEGAL CONCEPT Vol. 2:1 I. IN T R O D U CT IO N ................................................................................................................ 3 II. FROM CLASSIC LIBERALISM TO RACIAL LIBERALISM ........................................ 12 A . T he R acial C ontract ......................................................................................................... 12 B. The Invention of Race as a Justification for Subordination ........................................ 16 III.THE FUNCTION OF THE HUMAN RACES: AN ABRIDGED INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IN THE SCIENCE OF RACE ........................................................................ 17 A . M onogenism , 1680-1850 ............................................................................................... 17 B . Polygenism , 1815-1860 ...................................................................................................... 21 C. Evolution and Eugenics, 1860-1945 .............................................................................. 23 D. Ethnicity vs. Race, 1935-1980 ....................................................................................... 27 E. The Biological Foundation of Race is Fiction ............................................................. 29 IV. NEOLIBERALISM AND POST-RACIAL COLORBLINDNESS .................................. 30 A. The Classic Liberal Style: From Slave Law to Jim Crow ............................................ 34 B. The Modern Liberal Style: From Brown to Affirmative Action .................................. 38 C. The Neoliberal Style: The Road to Parents Involved ................................................... 41 D . N eoliberalism and N eoracism .......................................................................................... 50 V. TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF RACE AS A LEGAL CONCEPT: TWO IDEAS FROM C O N FLICT O F LAW S ............................................................................................................ 55 A. A Functionalist Rendering of Parents Involved ........................................................... 57 1. The Realist Critique of Formalism and the Rise of Functionalism ........................ 57 2. What is the Function of Race as a Legal Concept? ................................................. 60 (i) Step One: Choose an Interpretive Method ....................................................... 61 (ii) Step Two: Foreground Neoracism and the Racial Contract ................................. 62 (iii) Step Three: Identify the Function of Race ....................................................... 62 (iv) Step Four: D ecide ............................................................................................. 62 B. Conflict of Laws as "Cultural Conflict"........................................................................ 62 1. W hy Conflict of Law s? ............................................................................................... 63 2. Thinking Sideways about Race and Culture ........................................................... 64 (i) Step One: Identify the Jurisdictional (Cultural) Conflict .................................. 65 2012 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF RACE AND LAW (ii) Step Two: Characterization of the Claim ........................................................... 68 (iii) Step Three: Identify the Rules .......................................................................... 69 (iv) Step Four: Identify the Interests ........................................................................ 71 (v) Step Five: D ecide ................................................................................................. 71 V I.C O N C LU SIO N ........................................................................................................................73 All in all, race is the modern West's worst idea. - Riclard King I. INTRODUCTION In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a biological construction of race was created as a way of justifying the oppression of non-Europeans. 2 Not only was the notion of the "human races" a lie, it was an imperialist fiction intended to rationalize a system of domination and subordination.3 American courts have failed to account for the deeply transformed connections between biology and imperialism, despite the fact that these connections have been well-developed in the social sciences and critical race theory.4 Since its birth, our legal system has constructed race through the use of biology5 -a use 1 RiCHARD KING, RACE, CULTURE, AND THE INTELLECTUALS, 1940-1970 1 (2004). 2 "Though it would be foolish to suggest that evil, brutality, and terror commence with the arrival of scientific racism toward the end of the eighteenth century, it would also be wrong to overlook the significance of that moment as a break point in the development of modern thinking about humanity and its nature." PAUL GILROY, BETWEEN CAMPS 31 (2004). See also ANTONIA DARDER & RODOLFO D. TORRES, AFTER RA(:E (2004). 3 HOWARD WINANT, THE WORLD IS A GHETTO: RACE AND DEMO(;RA(Y SINCE WORLD WAR II 22-23 (2001); GILROY, supra note 2. For discussion of the so-called "racial realists" who do not see it this way,and the view that racial domination is a relic, see MICHAEL K. BROWN ET AL., WHITEWASHING RA(CE: THE MYTH OF A COLOR-BLIND SOCIETY 1-33 (2004). 4 For a sample of the literature on critical race theory, see DERRICK BELL, RACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: THE PERMLANENCE OF RACISM (1993); CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE K EY WRITINGS THAT FORMED