WASHINGTON – When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned his dream of the “beloved community” where his children “would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” did he imagine the millennial post-racial society? Is King’s promised land a place where race plays no role in qualifying individuals in the U.S.?
Professor Trina Jones of the University of California Irvine School of Law prefers a contextual reading of King’s words, giving them meaning within the framework of Jim Crow America.
“This brand of colorblindness was in fact useful at a certain point of time in a segregated society … it was a powerful progressive tool for people of color who were subordinated because at least it brought them to the level of Whites in the eyes of the law,” she said. “So colorblindness had some utility but it’s problematic today.”
So alarming and over-reaching is today’s conception of color-blindness that the response by the nation’s courts to reverse discrimination claims has slowly eradicated race-based resource allocation in public institutions, law professors asserted during a Friday symposium titled “Post-Racialism in American Law and Lawyering,” hosted by the Georgetown Law Journal.
“Post-racialism might destroy equal protection jurisprudence,” said University of California Irvine School of Law professor Mario Barnes, who is also co-authoring a paper with Jones that follows the legal and historical roots of post-racialism.
Barnes defined post-racialism as “the belief in the attainment of racial progress that signals the end of the relevance of race” but he dismisses such ideas as “delusional” pointing instead to the social and economic disparities that burden people of color.
Examining the opinions of Supreme Court justices as far back as the Plessy v. Ferguson case, Jones and Barnes find evidence of a racial ideology that continues to justify White supremacy in national systems.
