Quoth the Raven: The Maryland Law Faculty Blog

Post-Racialism Mississippi Style

Taunya Lovell Banks

The Smoking Gun just reported that the Nettleton Middle School located in a tiny town a few miles south of Elvis Presley’s birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi, distributed an informational memo to its students about the forthcoming elections for class officers.  According to this memo students running for 8^th grade class president or reporter must be white, and students running for vice president or secretary-treasurer must be black.  The requirements differ slightly for 7^th and 6^th grade class officers.  Black seventh graders are only eligible for the secretary-treasurer position, and black six graders for the reporter position.  Otherwise the eligibility criteria, B average, good attendance and disciplinary record, are the same for all grades and positions.

Incomplete Truths: Women, Title IX and Sports - Racial and Wealth Disparities

Taunya Lovell Banks

Almost forty years ago Congress enacted Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments which provides: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."  Today although support for women’s high school and college sports is well established, men’s sports remain better funded and more prestigious.  This point is unsurprising.  What is news is that the primary beneficiaries of Title IX have been white women, the dominance of black women student athletes in women’s basketball notwithstanding.  (For information about participation rates at NCAA colleges and universities broken down by race and gender, click here).

Law Professor Deborah L. Blake explains the reasons in her new book, Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women's Sports Revolution.  According to a recent article about this book in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Congress in opening the door to greater participation of women in competitive sports “failed to consider persistent racial inequality in our nation’s public schools....where sports offerings in urban and low-income areas . . . scant for boys, and even more limited for girls . . . thwart female athletes' access to sports at the college level.”

While this is an interesting story, what caught my eye were the comments following the story.

Race and Marketing in Post-Racial America II – White Girl Salsa

Taunya Lovell Banks 

The other day I ran across an internet recommendation for White Girl Salsa. Curious, I wanted to know more about the product, and its name.  The product website conveniently provided that information.  Julie Nirvelli, the face of White Girl Salsa, writes: “Before living in Colorado I was very close with a Hispanic family and attended all their family gatherings. I was the token white girl.”  This family, after sampling Nirvelli’s green, tomatillo salsa, raved about it dubbing the condiment, “White Girl Salsa,” thus the product was born and named.   This story illustrates an interesting variation on the use of race in marketing – a product that challenges racialized stereotypes, namely that white girls cannot make good salsa.

“What we've got here is failure to communicate”: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Redux

Taunya Lovell Banks

There is a famous line from the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman as Lucas (Luke) Jackson: "What we've got here is failure to communicate."  Luke is confined in a rural prison after being convicted of destroying public property (cutting the tops off of parking meters) where he repeatedly tries to escape. The line is said twice, first by the brutal prison Captain as a warning to prisoners who are watching him punish Luke upon his recapture, and again at the end by Luke, who has escaped again, and is surrounded by his potential captors.  Just before he is shot, Luke remarks, ironically: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”  According the the folks at Wikipedia: “In contemporary usage the line is usually an illustrative mockery of the principle behind it; the allocation of blame or fault for refusal to agree with or accept a powerful nemesis.”

I was reminded of the film and its famous line last week when a review panel, convened by the police department of Cambridge, Massachusetts concluded that the well publicized confrontation last summer between Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates and Police Sergeant James Crowley was caused by “‘failed communications’ between the police officer and the scholar.”  The Cambridge Review Panel composed of experts in criminal justice, law, conflict resolution and community relations wrote that “Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates each missed opportunities to ‘ratchet down’ the situation and end it peacefully.”   “If . . . both men had shared responsibility for understanding each other and communicating openly, the outcome could have been better.”    

Good News and Bad News: Blacks (and Latina/os) in College Seven Years after Grutter

Taunya Lovell Banks

         A recent post in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Richard Kahlenberg, the well regarded expert on American education, announced as “good news” statistics from a forthcoming government report, The Condition of Education 2010 showing that “the gap between high-income and low-income groups immediately enrolling in college shrunk substantially, from 41 percentage points in 1972 to 25 percentage points in 2008.”    Now the bad news, according to this report, “black and Hispanic students were eight times as likely as whites to be stuck in high poverty elementary schools (those with more than 75% of students from low-income families) and 15 times as likely to be in high poverty middle and high schools.”  America continues to get failing marks on educational equality.  Non-white children and all children from impoverished families continue to be concentrated in this nation’s poorest primary and secondary public schools.  Children who receive inadequate primary and secondary educations are less likely to gain admission to the most selective colleges and universities.  In today’s increasingly competitive world, where you went to college may be more important than a college degree in determing whether you get a good job. 

Post-Racial “Race Talk” and the Marketing of Tampons

Taunya Lovell Banks

Hi, I’m a believable attractive 18-24 year old female.  You can relate to me because I’m racially ambiguous and I’m in this tampon commercial because market research shows that girls like you love girls like me. Don’t all these angles make me seem dynamic? Now I’m going to tell you to buy something.  Buy the same tampons I use because I am wearing white pants and I have good hair and you wish you could be me.

This is an actual advertisement by Kotex, the sanitary products manufacturer, now airing on television.  If you are like me and seldom watch live TV you probably missed this “spoof” of early tampon ads fast forwarding through commercials on recorded programs.  And yes, she said “racially ambiguous.” 

Welcome to the “post-racial” era where “race” now can be acknowledged without pejorative insinuation, a variation of “colorblindness.”   Previously, race mattered primarily in negative ways.  Now, in some circles, race is discussed in ways that suggest it is no longer a significant factor in American life.  As this century began a group of young black artists announced they were creating “post-black” art, “art about the black experience that attempts to dispel the notion that race matters.”  But is post-black really only the “new black”?

Why Should We Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird?

Taunya Lovell Banks

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Most law students know about its protagonist, Atticus Finch, having read the novel or seen the sanitized film version released in 1962. Finch, the widower and small-town Alabama lawyer, remains an icon in the minds of law students, lawyers and the general public. Thus it came as no surprise that my Law & Literature seminar students after reading several fictional and non-fictional stories about flawed lawyers suggested I add Lee’s book to next year’s list of readings to provide a positive counter image.

In the decade since I started teaching the seminar my students never read about Atticus Finch. This was a conscious decision because I, and a few other people, do not consider Finch especially heroic. He was a decent man practicing law in an unjust society who did his job, nothing more. Several years ago in writing about the film adaptation of the book I said: “Finch, by putting on an earnest defense in Tom Robinson’s case, was breaking the rules of his racially segregated society . . . . [and] perhaps this is what resonates with many people who tout [him] as the ideal lawyer.”[1]

In the early 1990s legal ethics scholar Monroe Freedman complained that Finch was not a good moral example for contemporary lawyers because, among other things, he did not volunteer to take the case.[2] He was appointed by the local judge to represent Robinson and theoretically could not refuse. At times Finch even comes across as an apologist. When his children ask about the Ku Klux Klan, he says it is a “political organization more than anything.” He conceals from them the awful truth about that organization’s use of violence and intimidation to deny black Americans basic civil rights.

Freedman was attacked by other lawyers for characterizing Finch as an unworthy moral and ethical legal role model. Subsequently he wrote:

We’re left with the immortal Atticus Finch, a lawyer who didn’t do pro bono work, who justified the actions of an attempted murderer, and who found little fault with the Ku Klux Klan. Finch may live on as a mythical figure, but we should ask why some members of the legal profession find him worthy of deification and why they are so vociferous in his defense.[3]