Devon W. Carbado (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – School of Law) has posted Can you be Black and Teach that?, New York University Law Review (forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Notwithstanding the broad literature on race and constitutional criminal procedure, scholars have rarely engaged the epistemological burdens Fourth Amendment law imposes on Black students and faculty. Those burdens derive from a fundamental and insufficiently acknowledged disjuncture: despite the rights-protecting language in the Fourth Amendment (in particular, its prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures”), Fourth Amendment law is, for Black people, a domain of existential violence. It is Fourth Amendment law that determines when and how the police may engage us in our homes, in our cars, at school, and on our streets—and it is Fourth Amendment law that produces and governs the anti-Black border between surveillance and death. This fraught and necrological feature of Fourth Amendment law sets the doctrinal terms on which Black students must learn, and Black faculty must teach, the law. In that regard, the violence Black people encounter in the context of engaging Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is against the very Black body they occupy. This Article describes that normalized epistemological environment. One might think of the account the Article provides as a pedagogy of the Black body, or more precisely, as an articulation of what the Black body can teach us about the racialized “field of pain and death” Fourth Amendment law produces. That field includes a constitutional archive that requires Black people to learn and teach law through our legally sanctioned disposability. Fourth Amendment law is thus not merely violent in its social effects; it is epistemologically violent—and legal pedagogy is one of the sites where that violence is reproduced.
Highly Recommended!
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