"Must reading for anyone who seeks a better understanding of the
U.S. Supreme Court's role in race relations policy."
--"Choice"
"Beware Those committed to the Supreme Court as the ultimate
defender of minority rights should not read Race Against the Court.
Through a systematic peeling away of antimajoritarian myth, Spann
reveals why the measure of relief the Court grants victims of
racial injustice is determined less by the character of harm
suffered by blacks than the degree of disadvantage the relief
sought will impose on whites. A truly pathbreaking work."
--Derrick Bell
As persuasive as it is bold. Race Against The Court stands as a
necessary warning to a generation of progressives who have come to
depend on the Supreme Court of the perils of such dependency. It
joins with Bruce Ackerman's We, the People and John Brigham's Cult
of the Court as the best in contemporary work on the Supreme
Court.
--Austin Sarat, William Nelson, Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence
and Political Science, Amherst College
The controversies surrounding the nominations, confirmations,
and rejections of recent Supreme Court justices, and the
increasingly conservative nature of the Court, have focused
attention on the Supreme Court as never before. Although the
Supreme Court is commonly understood to be the guardian of minority
rights against the tyranny of the majority, Race Against The Court
argues that the Court has never successfully performed this
function. Rather the actual function of the Court has been to
perpetuate the subordination of racial minorities by operating as
an undetected agent of majoritarian preferences in the political
preferences. In this provocative, controversial, and timely work,
Girardeau Spann illustrates how the selection process for Supreme
Court justices ensures that they will share the political
preferences of the elite majority that runs the nation. Customary
safeguards that are designed to protect the judicial process from
majoritarian predispositions, Spann contends, cannot successfully
insulate judicial decisionmaking from the pervasive societal
pressures that exist to discount racial minority interests.
The case most often cited as the icon of Court sensitivity to
minority rights, Brown v. Board of Education, has more recently
served to lull minorities into believing that efforts at political
self-determination are futile, fostering a seductive dependence and
overreliance on the Court as the caretaker of minority rights. Race
Against The Court demonstrates how the Court has centralized the
law of affirmative action in a way that stymies minority efforts
for meaningful political and economic gain and how it has
legitimated the legal status quo in a way that causes minorities
never even to question the inevitability of their subordinate
social status.
Spann contends that racial minorities would be better off
seeking to advance their interests in the pluralist political
process and proposes a novel strategy for minorities to pursue in
order to extricate themselves from the seemingly inescapable grasp
of Supreme Court protection. Certain to generate lively, heated
debate, "Race Against The Court" exposes the veiled majoritarianism
of the Supreme Court and the dangers of allowing the Court to
formulate our national racial policy.
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