Beyond Colorblindness: Neo-Racialism and the Future of Race and Law Scholarship
By Ralph Richard Banks
Anniversaries are a time to reflect, to reexamine the present and look toward the future by taking account of the past. The 25th anniversary of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal is a momentous occasion. Generations of law students have worked, often late into the night, to produce a quality journal of race and law scholarship. Although in its early years the prospects for success may have seemed dim, BlackLetter has thrived.
The Journal’s 25th anniversary coincides with a landmark in American history: The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America.1 BlackLetter was founded in 1984, only a few years before Barack Obama entered Harvard Law School.
In this Essay, I consider the role of racism in American society through the lens of Obama’s victory, and, by extension, its implications for scholarship about race and law. The election of Barack Obama signifies a break with our racial past. It unsettles a longstanding cultural narrative—one oddly comforting in its familiarity—in which racism looms as the central and often unyielding impediment to black advancement. Obama’s triumph does not, as some pundits have suggested, herald a post-racial era, if by that one means a society in which race is no longer meaningful. Race remains salient and racial inequalities are too entrenched and pervasive to ignore. But one need not indulge the fantasy that we have transcended race in order to acknowledge that the role of racism in American society has shifted.
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