"Social Justice Forum: Writing by SCU Law Faculty."
Thursday, January 22, 2009 from noon to 1 p.m. in Bannan 139. Food will be provided.
Professors Armstrong and Wildman will lead a discussion of their article:
Teaching Race/Teaching Whiteness: Transforming Colorblindness to Color Insight? 86 North Carolina Law Review 635-672 (2008)
The Article argues that whiteness operates as the normative foundation of most discussions of race. Legal educators often overlook the role of whiteness in the law school setting and in law more generally. Identifying and understanding whiteness should be an essential component of legal education, yet legal education rarely addresses the normative role played by whiteness. An incomplete understanding of the nature of white privilege and the modern move toward "colorblindness" conceal the raced nature of much law. To draw the harmful operation of colorblindness into relief, the article proposes adopting "color insight," which would admit that most of us do see race and underline the need to understand what that racial awareness might mean. Color insight is particularly essential in the law school environment where legal educators need to ensure that students do not encounter race only by happenstance or believe race only affects people of color.
Excerpts of the article for discussion are available to students at http://law.scu.edu/socialjustice/file/TeachingRaceedited.pdf and outside Bergin 214. The full article is available on Westlaw and Lexis at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1108476.