Introduction to Patricia J. Williams

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw ◽  
Patricia J. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Beloved Community ◽  
Substantive Justice ◽  
Black Single Mothers ◽  
American Society ◽  
Good And Evil

The brilliance of Patricia Williams’s work lies in her ability to use the personal to analyse the structures and institutions that affect our ways of living together. She has an unerring eye for the telling story which reveals to us our habits of being. As one of the foremost public intellectuals in the United States, she brings the qualities of a great and witty storyteller to her training as a lawyer, and tells us about ourselves. In her books The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991) and The Rooster’s Egg (1995), she reveals the institutional racism that seeps through American society, corroding human rights on a day-to-day basis in ways both large and small. She shows how popular notions of racial difference are transmitted through American culture in myths about black single mothers and about America as a ‘colour-blind’ land of opportunity and hard work. She analyses the media’s sensational reporting of African-Americans in positions of authority and of crimes involving black people. At the heart of such myths and media sensationalism, she argues, is a crippling fear of the other which divides societies against themselves, to everyone’s loss and no one’s gain. It is this sense—that fear impedes and destroys civil rights and humiliates individuals on a daily basis—which drives the analysis she offers of American civil and urban society at this peculiar time of the ‘war on terror’ in her Oxford Amnesty Lecture. Beginning with the notion that America has a very particular notion of division within cities, one which is rooted in its own settler history where good and evil are seen to be battling for control, she then describes the present crisis as a structural problem masquerading as a personal one. Urban chaos is seen as ‘the result [. . .] of personal choice to side with darkness’. Consequently, the threat of terrorism within America is viewed as one that is to be confronted by ‘the project of rooting out the Evil-doers among us’. This is ‘an enterprise in which the application of due process and substantive justice is subordinated to a kind of secularized casting-out-of-demons from the Beloved Community’.

Emigrant Psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI Archives

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Nation

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

The 1970s

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Borstelmann
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Retirement Plans ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Oil Crisis ◽  
American Society

This book looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, this book creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. It demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more—and less—equal. This book explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America. Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the movement for civil rights grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. And developments were not limited to the United States. Many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China. Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective, this book shows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations upon American society and the broader world that continue to resonate today.

The Judicialization of American Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Blokhuis ◽  
Randall Curren
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Due Process ◽  
School Funding ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Education ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
School Officials

Judicialization is the term most commonly used to describe the supervening authority of the courts in virtually every sphere of public life in liberal democratic states. In the United States, where judicialization is most advanced, political and administrative decisions by agencies and officials at every level of government are subject to constitutional scrutiny, and thus to the oversight and substituted decision-making authority of unelected members of the federal judiciary. The judicialization of American education is associated with the judicial review of administrative decisions by public school officials in lawsuits filed in the federal courts by or on behalf of students alleging due process and other Constitutional rights violations. So defined, the judicialization of American education has been facilitated by a number of legal and social developments in the Civil Rights Era, including the ascription of limited Constitutional rights to minors in public schools, the expansion of government agency liability, and the ensuing proliferation of lawsuits under Section 1983. Judicialization has been criticized for subjecting routine administrative decisions to complex and costly procedural regimentation, for distorting social relations by subjecting them to legal oversight, and for flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits. The causes and outcomes of the judicialization of American education present a complex and mixed picture, however. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity’s Legal Services Program has played a central role in judicialization by providing legal resources to confront racial injustice in the punishment of students and in school funding.

Plessy’s Long Shadow

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Law

The supreme court’s 1896 Decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served to bring the law into a dismal harmony with the nation’s view of race in life. The Court decided that segregation in public facilities through “separate but equal” accommodations for black citizens would satisfy the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. The years since the sporadically enforced policies of Reconstruction ended in 1876 had been hard for those former slaves and their offspring whose slavery had legally ended with the passage of the Thir­teenth Amendment in 1865. To ensure their rights to due process and the equal protection of the law, the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 provided that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Despite legislation intended to provide enforcement of these rights, the laws were poorly enforced and most were subsequently declared unconstitutional. Corrupting law but relying on intimidation and violence, southern governments stripped blacks of political power. Given meaningful if unspoken assurances that the federal government would not protect black civil rights, conservative southerners regained power utilizing racial fear and hatred to break up competing populist groups of poor black and white farmers. In addition to the disenfranchisement of blacks, whites sought to secure their power through intensive anti-Negro propaganda campaigns championing white supremacy. Literary and scientific leaders published tracts and books intended to “prove” the inhumanity of the Negro. In this hostile climate, segregation laws that had made a brief appearance during Reconstruction were revived across the South, accompanied by waves of violence punctuated by an increase in lynchings and race riots. In an effort both to protest the indignity of segregation and challenge its validity, Homer Plessy, acting for a New Orleans civil rights group, attempted to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites. He was arrested and convicted of violating Louisiana’s 1890 segregation law. On appeal, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the Fourteenth Amendment required absolute equality of the two races before the law, adding: “but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Freezing Financial Assets in The United States and in Mexico: Contrasts in Constitutionality and Legal Parallels

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Delia Sánchez Castillo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Money Laundering ◽  
Legal System ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Financial Assets ◽  
The Us

The purpose of this article is to understand how asset freezing works in the United States of America and in Mexico, as well as the contrasts and similarities in both systems. The threats posed to civil rights that can arise from asset freezing led us to compare the judicial criteria held by the US Courts and the corresponding reasoning in the Mexican legal system. Alternative rulings from European courts are also considered. Finally, some recommendations are made to improve due process in the Mexican legal system after preventing money laundering and funding terrorism when freezing financial assets.

United States Vagrancy Laws

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risa L. Goluboff ◽  
Adam Sorensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
American Law ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The Unemployed

The crime of vagrancy has deep historical roots in American law and legal culture. Originating in 16th-century England, vagrancy laws came to the New World with the colonists and soon proliferated throughout the British colonies and, later, the United States. Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious. Vagrancy laws often included prohibitions on loitering—wandering around without any apparent lawful purpose—though some jurisdictions criminalized loitering separately. Taken together, vaguely worded vagrancy, loitering, and suspicious persons laws targeted objectionable “out of place” people rather than any particular conduct. They served as a ubiquitous tool for maintaining hierarchy and order in American society. Their application changed alongside perceived threats to the social fabric, at different times and places targeting the unemployed, labor activists, radical orators, cultural and sexual nonconformists, racial and religious minorities, civil rights protesters, and the poor. By the mid-20th century, vagrancy laws served as the basis for hundreds of thousands of arrests every year. But over the course of just two decades, the crime of vagrancy, virtually unquestioned for four hundred years, unraveled. Profound social upheaval in the 1960s produced a concerted effort against the vagrancy regime, and in 1972, the US Supreme Court invalidated the laws. Local authorities have spent the years since looking for alternatives to the many functions vagrancy laws once served.

Scottsboro Trials

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Yellin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Women ◽  
Due Process ◽  
African American Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Us

In 1931, nine young African-American men were accused of raping two white women in northern Alabama while traveling on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee. The young men—Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, and Roy Wright—were innocent. Saved from a mob lynching, they nonetheless endured a series of unfair trials over seven years; eight received death sentences. (Roy Wright, just turned thirteen, was held in limbo until 1937 because of his youth.) Embraced by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as well as a broad collection of left-wing organizations and artists, the fight for the young men’s lives became an international movement. Their defense was eventually paid for by the CPUSA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and taken on by Samuel Liebowitz, a celebrated criminal attorney whose Judaism invited vicious anti-Semitism from white southerners. Their case led to two landmark Supreme Court case rulings regarding due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment: Powell v. Alabama (1932) reversed the defendants’ convictions based on inadequate counsel, while Norris v. Alabama (1935) established that officials in Alabama had violated the defendants’ constitutional rights by excluding black Alabamans from juries. Over the course of the trials, the two accusers—Ruby Bates and Victoria Price—were celebrated as the epitome of southern white womanhood and then maligned as lying “white trash” harlots. That Bates later recanted and campaigned for the defendants’ freedom did little to earn her full personhood in the received history. The “Scottsboro Boys” spent years, some more than a decade, in America’s worst prisons and suffered physical and psychological damage that would prove irreparable. Five of the defendants were released when the prosecution chose not to proceed with their cases in 1937, though this nolle prosequi decision was not an acquittal, exoneration, or apology. The last to remain in jail, Andy Wright, was released in 1950. Alabama Governor George Wallace pardoned the last living Scottsboro defendant, Clarence Norris, in 1976. Finally, in April 2013, Alabama changed its law to allow posthumous pardons, and the remaining three defendants were officially pardoned that November. The Scottsboro case is a crucial part of the histories of African Americans, the US South, race and gender in the 20th-century United States, the transnational modern civil rights and labor movements, the Great Depression, and the US justice system.

Roadside Americans

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Reid
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
White House ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Reagan Era

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet, by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White House, the youthful faces on the road chasing the ghost of Jack Kerouac were largely gone—along with sympathetic portrayals of the practice in state legislatures and the media. In Roadside Americans, Jack Reid traces the rise and fall of hitchhiking, offering vivid accounts of life on the road and how the act of soliciting rides from strangers, and the attitude toward hitchhikers in American society, evolved over time in synch with broader economic, political, and cultural shifts. In doing so, Reid offers insight into significant changes in the United States amid the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Reagan Era.

THE HISTORY AND PROGRESS OF BLACK CITIZENSHIP

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-277
Author(s):  
Leah Wright Rigueur ◽  
Anna Beshlian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Strategic Approach ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis paper offers a broad overview of Black citizenship within the United States, concentrating on the major shifts in Black life that have transpired since the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We examine several critical aspects of Black citizenship including economic status, education, criminal justice and mass incarceration, and political participation. Our report reveals that Black progress toward equal citizenship is inconsistent at best; at worst, it is stagnant and at times, regressive. As such, we conclude that dramatic solutions beyond traditional reformist approaches are needed in order to realize genuine citizenship and equal rights for Black people within the United States. In closing, we briefly highlight a specific example of a strategic approach to advancing substantive social and political change.

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