Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-6376-6132

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Keywords

Racial inequality, Discrimination, American history, Racial discourse, Reconstruction, Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

This Article proceeds in three principle parts. Part II explains the role of rhetoric and narratives in shaping commonly held societal beliefs and argues that racial exhaustion discourse functions as a social script that seeks to portray the United States as a post-racist society. Part II then summarizes the basic content of racial exhaustion rhetoric and identifies five common arguments that have endured across historical contexts, which depict race-based remedies as redundant, taxing, injurious to whites, special handouts to blacks, and futile because law cannot alter racial inequality. Next, Part II examines the political rhetoric employed by nineteenth-century Congressional opponents to Reconstruction and by the Supreme Court in order to illustrate the usage of racial exhaustion discourse as an early rhetorical instrument to contest race-based remedies and claims of racial injustice. Part III analyzes domestic and international factors that created political opportunities for the successful advocacy of progressive racial policies after World War I, during World War II, and in the subsequent Cold War era. Part III then demonstrates that, despite the changing political conditions that promoted progress in United States race relations, opponents of racial egalitarianism during these historical moments dismissed race-based remedies as excessive and unfair. Finally, Part III examines the deployment of racial exhaustion rhetoric in contemporary political and juridical discourse in order to situate current usage of this rhetoric within a broader historical context. Part IV considers how racial exhaustion rhetoric hinders political opportunities for antiracist social movements. Given the pervasive and persistent belief that the United States has transcended racial inequality, antiracist social movements may have to reframe some of their agendas in race-neutral terms, including the advocacy of class-based remedies. Such a decision risks artificially conflating the experiences of poor persons across racial and gender lines, and it could generate political opposition which depicts antipoverty policies as special handouts to undeserving individuals, in particular persons of color. Nevertheless, successful antiracist political mobilization and legal arguments might require that social movements contest the premises of racial exhaustion rhetoric while simultaneously laboring within its confines.

First Page

917

Publication Title

Washington University Law Review

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