1. john powell
Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
Moritz College of Law
Director, The Kirwan Institute for the Study of
Race & Ethnicity
The Ohio State University
March 18, 2011, U.C
Irvine

2. Today, . . . with the important exception of
employment discrimination, work, livelihoods, social
provision, and the material bases of citizenship
have vanished from the constitutional landscape.
That is a scandal, for the United States is no different
from other nations: Constitutional democracy is
really impossible here . . . without some limits on
social and economic deprivation.
- William E. Forbath, “Social and Economic Rights in
the American Grain”

3. Critical Race Theory on
the Non-Separation
Between Race and
Class

4.  Race, class, and the other categories of
difference that make a difference are co-
constitutive.
 This co-constitution operates at all scales:
• Individual identity
• Group identity and membership
• Intergroup coalitions
• Across space and over time

5.  The New Deal’s racial exclusion
• Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White
• Systematic exclusion of non-whites from New
Deal programs
• Entrenched structural inequality that remains
with us today in the former of harms to people of
color in housing, credit, and labor markets

6.  The weakness of the American welfare
state
• Alberto Alesina & Ed Glaeser
 U.S. welfare state miserly compared to Western
European peers
• Irwin Garfinkel et al.
 Even if U.S. welfare state isn’t so small, it grossly
misallocates resources and is generally regressive
• Joe Soss et al.
 Politics of welfare provision at the state level remains
deeply racialized

7.  Thought-leaders continue to diagnose
the moment as “post-X,” especially post-
racial.
 We hardly need to be reminded that
we’re not post-racial, even if racialization
works differently in the Age of Obama.
 Hence the persistent relevance of CRT’s
insistence on the intersectional
perspective.

8. From Race and Class to
the Structure of
Opportunity

9.  Race and class continue to be important
modes of individual and group identity-
formation.
 But the signal function of race and class is
their role in sorting individuals and
groups within/among institutions.
 Therefore, we must shift our inquiry to
the racialization of opportunity
structures.

10. Effective
Participation
Childcare Employment
Housing
Education Health
Transportation

11.  Structural racism/racialization
• Inter-institutional arrangements and interactions
produce racialized outcomes
 Implicit bias
• Non-conscious attitudes that give rise to mental
schemas, which embed racism and produce
biased behavior.

12.  It’san open question whether America’s
changing racial demographics alter the
picture I’ve sketched—a picture often
framed as white power vs. black
subordination.
 A tentative answer: Maybe not, because
blacks and Hispanics seem to be
converging vis-à-vis opportunity
structures.
• E.g., segregation patterns

13. The Dynamic Role of
Corporate Power

14.  The debate around Citizens United stages
one way to talk about corporate power,
i.e. the apparently zero-sum relationship
between corporate rights and individual
rights.
 Consider in this light the appropriation of
the 14th Amendment to vindicate
corporate rights rather than civil rights.
 But corporations increasingly rework how
power shapes key domains of life.

15.  Misidentifying
the situation, not
public vs. private
Public Private
 Expansion of Private
corporate
prerogative Spheres
Corporate
 Corporate space
diminishes Non- Corporat
public &private
space pubic e
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