[BGSN] CLEAR January "Perspectives" reading group at UCI School of Law

[Thomas McClain]

Hey Everybody,

 

I hope that you are all having a nice weekend. On Wednesday, January 30,
from 6 to 8 pm in Law Building rm. 3500, the UC Irvine School of Law Center
for Law, Equality, and Race (CLEAR) will be holding its monthly
"Perspectives" reading group. This month, Professor Mario Barnes will
present Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race. In his book, Professor Mack

 

tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through
the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked
in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for
diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as
black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks
and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial
community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they
were expected to be "authentic"-that is, in sympathy with the black masses.
This conundrum, as Kenneth W. Mack shows, continues to reverberate through
American politics today. 

 

Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood
Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent
whites that he was-as nearly as possible-one of them. But he also introduces
a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These
include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in
college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black
attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray,
a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who
helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these
lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to
"represent" a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and
politics?

 

Harvard University Press. For more on Representing the Race, check out the
NPR interview with Professor Mack at
<http://www.npr.org/2012/06/28/155913653/black-legal-giants-struggled-with-r
ole-identity>
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/28/155913653/black-legal-giants-struggled-with-ro
le-identity.

 

Snacks and beverages will be provided. Please feel free to email me with any
questions. 

 

Tommy McClain

 <mailto:tmcclain at uci.edu> tmcclain at uci.edu

 

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