Adrien Katherine Wing - Critical Race Feminism: A Reader

A Reader

Second Edition

Edited by Adrien Katherine Wing

Foreword to Second Edition by Richard Delgado

Foreword to First Edition by Derrick Bell

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS * New York & London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress. Org

Copyright 2003 by New York University and Adrien Katherine Wing

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Critical race feminism : a reader / edited by Adrien Katherine Wing.

--2nd ed. / foreword to second edition by Richard Delgado ; foreword

to first edition by Derrick Bell.

p. cm.--(Critical America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8147-93.93-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8147-9394-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Minority women--Social conditions. 2. Minority women--United States--Social conditions. 3. Sex discrimination against women. 4. Sex discrimination against women--United States. 5. Race discrimination. 6. Race discrimination--United States. 7. Feminism. 8. Feminist theory. I. Wing, Adrien Katherine. II. Series. HQ1154.C75 2003

305.48'8'00973--dc21 2003008960

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 98765432

Critical Race Feminism

Critical America General Editors: RICHARD DELGADO and JEAN STEFANCIC

White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race Ian F. Haney Lopez

Cultivating Intelligence: Power, Law, and the Politics of Teaching Louise Harmon and Deborah W. Post

Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America

Stephanie M. Wildman with Margalynne Armstrong, Adrienne D. Davis, and Trina Grillo

Does the Law Morally Bind the Poor? or What Good's the Constitution When You Can't Afford a Loaf of Bread? R. George Wright

Hybrid: Bisexuals, Multiracials, and Other Misfits under American Law

Ruth Colker

Critical Race Feminism: A Reader Edited by Adrien Katherine Wing

Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States

Edited by Juan F. Perea

Taxing America Edited by Karen B. Brown and Mary Louise Fellows

Notes of a Racial Caste Baby: Color Blindness and the End of Affirmative Action

Bryan K. Fair

Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State Stephen M. Feldman

To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation

Bill Ong Hing

Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America

Jody David Armour

Black and Brown in America: The Case for Cooperation Bill Piatt

Black Rage Confronts the Law Paul Harris

Selling Words: Free Speech in a Commercial Culture R. George Wright

iv

The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions Katheryn K. Russell

The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law Robert L. Hayman, Jr.

Was Blind, but Now I See: White Race Consciousness and the Law Barbara J. Flagg

The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law Nancy Levit

Heretics in the Temple: Americans Who Reject the Nation's Legal Faith David Ray Papke

The Empire Strikes Back: Outsiders and the Struggle over Legal Education

Arthur Austin

Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America

Eric K. Yamamoto

Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader Edited by Devon Carbado

When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice Edited by Roy L. Brooks

Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation State Robert S. Chang

Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom Andrew E. Taslitz

The Passions of Law Edited by Susan A. Bandes

Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader Edited by Adrien Katherine Wing

Law and Religion: Critical Essays Edited by Stephen M. Feldman

Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity Clara E. Rodriguez

From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement Luke Cole and Sheila Foster

Nothing but the Truth: Why Trial Lawyers Don't, Can't, and Shouldn't Have to Tell the Whole Truth Steven Lubet

v

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

Playing It Safe: How the Supreme Court Sidesteps Hard Cases Lisa A. Kloppenberg

Why Lawsuits Are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law Carl T. Bogus

How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People: A Tactical Manual for

Pragmatic Progressives John K. Wilson Aftermath:

The Clinton Impeachment and the Presidency in the Age of Political Spectacle Edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Beverly I. Moran Getting over Equality:

A Critical Diagnosis of Religious Freedom in America Steven D. Smith

Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury Carl Gutirrez-Jones

Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation John P. Jackson, Jr.

Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights Markus Dirk Dubber Original Sin:

Clarence Thomas and the Failure of the Constitutional Conservatives Samuel A. Marcosson

Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime Jeannine Bell

Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements

Alexander Tsesis

Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology Edited by Berta Esperanza Hernndez-Truyol

In the Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader Kevin R. Johnson

Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, Second Edition Edited by Adrien Katherine Wing

vi

vii

[BLANK PAGE]

At one point in my long and checkered career, I taught at a law school whose faculty contained few women of color. In fact, they were in a very small minority--zero. The faculty roster included many women, nine that I can remember, but every one of them was white. It also included many men of color--specifically, seven out of twenty-three. But not one woman of color.

When the glaring absence of black, Latina, and Asian women in a faculty serving a student body that included many women of color--indeed, more than men--dawned on me, I struggled to figure out what it all might mean. Was it just a glitch, one of those anomalies that look peculiar but fall perfectly, as they say, within the range of error? Dusting off my old statistics lore, I made a quick calculation. Assuming that the population of women teaching candidates is about three-fourths white and one-fourth of color, then a law school that set out to hire a single woman professor would--if bias were not a factor--select a white woman about three-fourths of the time. But suppose it set out to hire two. The odds of selecting two Euro-American women in a row would be about nine-sixteenths. So on for each successively longer sequence of hires, so that by the time you get to nine in a row, the chances that all of them would be white are very low indeed.

So, something must be going on. But what? Not conscious discrimination, I reasoned; otherwise the men on the faculty would not be so diverse. Might cognitive theory and unconscious discrimination supply the explanation? Women on the faculty (maybe the men, too) were relying on old-girl networks, recommending friends from school or clerkships or people they knew from conferences or panel sessions. People like them, women with whom they could converse and who knew and understood their jokes, histories, and struggles. White women. Preference for the familiar, the known, the safe, the comfortable. No one set out consciously to hire nine white women professors in a row. It just happened.