[PEN-L:8835] Re: racism

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rod Hay wrote:

> If the left sticks to the concept of the equality of races, once formal
> equality (legal equality) is accomplished there is nothing left to do. The
> race issue is dead as a political issue in the United States because the
> formal battle is over. The left won. Legal racial equality is a fact. The
> substantive issue remains, however. And that battle can not be won by
> reverting to the old categories. A new understanding and a new strategy are
> needed. We are forced back to the issue of class and socialism. But instead of
> moving on the next battle. The left becomes irrelevant because in its
> frustration in defeat it turns inward. Attacks on other leftist becomes the
> order of the day. In its weakness it goes after the soft targets like the
> university and avoids any difficult issues. Abandons the real issues in US
> society to the right.

The problem with the above statement is the tendency of intellectuals to equate
concptual breakthrough with factual accomplishment.  The race battle is far from
over.  It is a flagrant neglect of fact to declare it so.  Even legally, racial
equality is not yet an accepted legal concept.
This is the battle cry of Critical Legal Studies (culturally based theory of
justice).

Bourgeois culture often leads its subject intellectuals to
blindly worship outdated tradition as indisputable universal
truth.  Scholars in the "Critical Legal Studies" movement in leading
American universities have challenged some of the most
cherished ideals of modern Western legal and political thought. CLS
thinkers in learned Western legal cycles claim that the rule of law is a
myth and that its defense by liberal thinkers is riddled with
inconsistencies.  Critical Legal Studies have been increasingly
successful in absorbing critical theory into established discourses of
law and politics. There are glimmers of the present in ancient Sophist
assertions of the conventionality of Justice, the sixteenth century
discrediting of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the utilitarian attack of
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832, a founder of the theory of legal positivism) on the
integrity of Common Law, or the Legal Realist critique of deductive legal
reasoning. The phenomenon of  the 'critical turn' may well be a recurring theme
in the histories of law, the exploration of which might provide valuable
perspectives at this current moment in the context of an evolving jurisprudence,
including not only intellectual challenges to particular legal orders, bodies of
legal theory and legal history, but also to dominant residual regimes
regarding the nature of law and of justice, and the recognition of possible
alternative political/economic orders, not discounting those voices and
arguments which had been excluded from the canons of capitalist jurisprudence
and racist legal history.

Henry C.K. Liu