Racism, abolition, and historical resemblance

Professor Khiara Bridges's Foreword makes several stunning contributions to unlocking the mystifying logic behind the Roberts Court's jurisprudence on racial discrimination, which has consistently stymied, and even reversed, progress toward racial justice. First, Bridges identifies the tes...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Harvard law review 2022-11, Vol.136 (1), p.F37-F58
Main Author: Roberts, Dorothy E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bridges, Khiara M
History
Jurisprudence
Law and legislation
Laws, regulations and rules
Prevention
Race discrimination
Racism
Remedies
Remedies (Law)
Resemblance (Philosophy)
Slavery
Social aspects
United States. Supreme Court
White supremacy movements
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Summary:Professor Khiara Bridges's Foreword makes several stunning contributions to unlocking the mystifying logic behind the Roberts Court's jurisprudence on racial discrimination, which has consistently stymied, and even reversed, progress toward racial justice. First, Bridges identifies the test the Roberts Court uses to determine which racial injuries count as violations of the U.S. Constitution. To qualify as racial discrimination, harms experienced by people of color today must resemble those that white supremacists inflicted on people of color in the pre- Civil Rights Era. The challenged law or policy must bear some "resemblances" to techniques of racial disenfranchisement that existed "in the bad old days," Bridges explains. I will call this crucial constitutional standard the historical-resemblance test. The crux of Bridges's critique of the Court's racial jurisprudence is that it deploys the historical resemblance test to deny remedies for racial injuries to nonwhite people when it finds their claims are not reminiscent enough of slavery and Jim Crow, while failing to require any historical resemblance at all to remedy white people's racial injuries. Instead, the Court has recognized "new" types of racial harms experienced by white people as constitutional violations simply because those harms feel like racism to the white claimants.
ISSN:0017-811X
2161-976X