Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:28:47.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Connecting Critical Race Theory with Second Generation Legal Consciousness Work in Obasogie's Blinded by Sight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Laura E. Gómez
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Sociologist and legal scholar Osagie Obasogie's study of how blind people “see” race reveals the usually invisible, taken-for-granted mechanisms that reproduce racism. In Blinded by Sight, he distinguishes racial consciousness from legal consciousness, though he notes their common emphases on studying how cumulative social practices and interactions produce commonsense understandings. I argue that there is much to be gained from connecting these two fields, one emanating primarily out of critical race theory and the other out of law and society scholarship. Legal consciousness offers an important avenue for bridging macro studies of race making with micro studies such as Obasogie's, which focus on individuals' experiences and practices of constructing race and learning racism.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Fall 2016 , pp. 1069 - 1077
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berrey, Ellen, and Nielsen, Laura Beth. 2007. Rights of Inclusion: Integrating Identity at the Bottom of the Dispute Pyramid. Law & Social Inquiry 32 (1): 233–60.Google Scholar
Engle Merry, Sally. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working Class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia. 2004. Consciousness and Ideology. In The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, ed. Sarat, Austin, 80–94. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, and Silbey, Susan. 1998. The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gómez, Laura E. 2004. A Tale of Two Genres: On the Real and Ideal Links Between Law and Society and Critical Race Theory. In The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, ed. Sarat, Austin, 453–70. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gómez, Laura E. 2007. Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Gómez, Laura E. 2010. Understanding Law and Race as Mutually Constitutive: An Invitation to Explore an Emerging Field. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6:487–505.Google Scholar
Gómez, Laura E. 2012. Looking for Race in All the Wrong Places. Law & Society Review 46 (2): 221–45.Google Scholar
Haney Lopez, Ian. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Elizabeth, and Lyons, Christopher J. 2010. Perceiving Discrimination on the Job: Legal Consciousness, Workplace Context, and the Construction of Race Discrimination. Law & Society Review 44 (2): 269–98.Google Scholar
Matsuda, Mari J. 1987. Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations. Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 22:323–99.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael. 1996. Causal Versus Constitutive Explanations (or On the Difficulty of Being So Positive…). Law & Social Inquiry 21(2): 457–82.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael. 2006. On Legal Rights Consciousness: A Challenging Analytical Tradition. In The New Civil Rights Research: A Constitutive Approach, ed. Fleury‐Steiner, Benjamin and Nielsen, Laura Beth. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Munger, Frank. 2004. Rights in the Shadow of Class: Poverty, Welfare and the Law. In The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, ed. Sarat, Austin, 330–53. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth. 2004. License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy and Offensive Public Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan. 2001. Legal Culture and Legal Consciousness. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Smelser, Neil J. and Bates, Paul B., 8623–29. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan. 2005. After Legal Consciousness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1:323–68.Google Scholar
Young, Kathryne M. 2014. Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight. Law & Society Review 48 (3): 499–530.Google Scholar