The Constitution of Identity: Law and Race

AuthorOsagie K. Obasogie
Pages339-350
The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Introduction
Law and society has developed a reputation for welcoming research that examines
the unique challenges faced by marginalized groups as well as the ways that law can
aggravate their adverse experiences – often under the guise of formal equality. This
reputation comes from the progressive roots of the field and its professional organi-
zation, the Law and Society Association. In questioning the traditional doctrinal
focus of legal studies and emphasizing the relevance of social context to law’s
development, law and society has been thought to be a natural home for scholars
interested in matters of race and racial justice and a place where progressive race
scholarship flourishes.
While there have certainly been individual scholars who have lived up to this
perception, significant questions have recently been raised about the overall trajec-
tory of law and society race scholarship. In this chapter, I review recent critiques of
law and society’s race scholarship to highlight the extent to which race has not
necessarily been treated in the sophisticated manner that is often assumed. After
reviewing these critiques, I then describe a nascent yet flourishing body of race
scholarship that, while working in the law and society tradition, attempts to tran-
scend the field’s limited perspective on race by developing methodological
approaches that blend empirical methods with critical race theory. Known as “eCRT,”
this emerging perspective acknowledges the gap that exists between social science
approaches to race and critical race insights. This chapter then describes the con-
tours of this new joint effort by discussing an example that can be found in my book
Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. In this book, I use
qualitative methods to examine the question ‘how do blind people understand race’
The Constitution of Identity
Law and Race1
Osagie K. Obasogie
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