footnotes

Home • What's New • About IRP • Best Practices • Maps • Research • Services
Links • Coming Events • Current Topics • Newsletters • News & Articles
Organization & Staff • Employment Opportunities • Your Suggestions & Ideas

Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School; Executive Director, Institute on Race and Poverty. I greatly appreciate the research assistance of Gavin Kearney. I also thank Dr. Donna Waters for her suggestions, and Sandy Levitsky and the Minnesota Law Review for publishing this tribute in memory of Professor Trina Grillo. I cannot express how important Trina was, and is, to me. Thank you, Trina—with love, john.

JAMES BALDWIN, Here Be Dragons, in THE PRICE OF THE TICKET: COLLECTED NONFICTION 1948-85, 677, 690 (1985).
Kenneth Gergen talks about the difficulty of choosing between competing voices or claims made upon oneself. He argues that there are multiple selves, each of which makes its own claims and demands. Implicit in this argument is that the notion of the unitary self has been fractured. While Gergen attributes this sort of fracturing to environmental and technological changes, as this Essay will make evident, others see it as the very nature of existence and/or discourse. See KENNETH J. GERGEN, THE SATURATED SELF: DILEMMAS OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE (1991).
Theories of language assert that one of the powers of language is its ability to determine that which is considered normal and that which is considered abnormal. See, e.g., MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE ORDER OF THINGS (Tavistock Publications Ltd. 1970) (1966).
IRIS MARION YOUNG, JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE 112 (1990).
Toni Morrison states that in dealing with matters of race and racial practices, it is important to look at not only what is present, but what is absent, what has been excluded. She also discusses how her understanding of the role of race in American literature fundamentally shifted when she began to focus on the writers’ use of structures and device, how she felt as though she had been looking at a bunch of goldfish all of her life and suddenly noticed the fish bowl. TONI MORRISON, PLAYING IN THE DARK: WHITENESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION 13-16 (1992). I have similarly described the role of the public interest lawyer to include making the invisible visible. See john a. powell, Righting the Law: Seeking a Humane Voice, 96 W. VA. L. REV. 333, 344 (1993-1994) (explaining that public interest lawyers must look to both the needs of individual clients and to the invisible forces which situate clients in a larger social context). One of the ways that dominant narratives and ideologies work to subordinate is by making the social causes of subordination seem natural and inevitable, that is, to make the practices invisible. See generally YOUNG, supra note 4. My goal is to help expose the unexposed; in a sense, to help us see the fishbowl.
As a linguistic convenience, this Essay will use the overly general terms "feminism" and "postmodernism." In doing so, my intent is not to assert that there is a single voice or vantage point for either of these categories, or that these categories are in any way mutually exclusive. Instead, I wish only to avoid being paralyzed by the task of articulating the infinite nuances and wrinkles that exist within and among them.
See infra Part IV (reviewing criticisms of the modern conception of the legal subject and arguing that this conception serves to perpetuate White male privilege).
See, e.g., Trina Grillo, Antiessentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House, 10 BERKELEY WOMEN’S L.J. 16, 17-19 (1995) (describing the intersectionality critique). This conception of the self will be presented in greater detail in Part II infra.
See, e.g., Katherine P. Ewing, The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency, 18 ETHOS 251, 251 (1990) (arguing that people "project multiple, inconsistent self-representations that are context-dependent and may shift rapidly"); Angela P. Harris, Foreword: The Unbearable Lightness of Identity, 11 BERKELEY WOMEN’S L.J. 207, 211 (1996) (arguing that the problem with any general theory of identity "is that ‘identity itself’ has little substance"); Jennifer Wicke, Postmodern Identity and the Legal Subject, 62 U. COLO. L. REV. 455, 463 (1991) (noting that a postmodern conception of identity recognizes the self as fragmented and captures "its fissuring by the myriad social discourses which construct it").
The attack on the essential self is part of a larger anti-foundationalism that challenges the notion that there is anything that is essential. It is also part of a tradition started by liberalism that denies that there is such a thing as intelligible essence. See generally ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER, KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICS (1984).
RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN, BEYOND OBJECTIVISM AND RELATIVISM: SCIENCE, HERMENEUTICS, AND PRAXIS 18 (1983).
Nietzsche was one of the first Western philosophers to claim that the self is constructed, multiple, and yet, in part, essential nonetheless. See FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS 76 (R.J. Hollingdale trans., Cambridge Univ. Press 1983) (arguing that in constructing a self we cannot banish history or inheritance, but must instead "confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it").
Again I must acknowledge that these terms are overly broad. Psychoanalysts and Buddhists have posited many different versions of the self.
Stuart Hall, The Question of Cultural Identity, in MODERNITY AND ITS FUTURES 595, 602 (Stuart Hall et al. eds., 1992).
Id.
Id. at 602-03. It bears mentioning that, although this notion of the sovereign and essential self had important implications for the liberation of those oppressed by pre-modern society, many of the principle proponents of this self felt that it only inhered in White Europeans. For example, David Hume asserted that "negroes" were akin to parrots in their intellectual capacities, only capable of mimicry; similarly Immanuel Kant felt that Blacks were intellectually inferior, and John Stuart Mill believed that Blacks lacked the capacity for self-government. DAVID THEO GOLDBERG, RACIST CULTURE: PHILOSOPHY AND THE POLITICS OF MEANING 6 (1993).
Given that the discoveries of the scientific revolution fueled the modernist belief that man could order reality, it is interesting to note that many of the fundamental "truths" of the scientific revolution are now considered incorrect. For example, the linearity of time, one of the so-called "dimensions" of reality, is now in disrepute as linear concepts of time create "boundaries that breed contradictions in the laws of science." William V. Dunning, Post-Modernism and the Construct of the Divisible Self, 33 BRIT. J. AESTHETICS 132, 135 (1993) (describing Stephen Hawking’s avoidance of a linear concept of time).
IMMANUEL KANT, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON 58 (Norman Kemp Smith trans., St. Martin’s Press 1968).
Id. at 45.
Id. at 154. It is interesting to note that here Kant considers and quickly dismisses the notion of a multiple self as inconceivable.
There is a subtle difference between the notion of the self and the notion of self-consciousness. It is a difference that is not always recognized and attended to in liberalism. Indeed, it was Descartes’s epistemology that asserted that self-consciousness was proof of a self. See infra notes 23-26 and accompanying text (quoting Descartes).
See KANT, supra note 18, at 60 (explaining that "[t]ranscendental philosophy is only the idea of a science, for which the critique of pure reason has to lay down the complete architectonic plan").
RENE DESCARTES, A DISCOURSE ON METHOD AND SELECTED WRITINGS 2 (John Veitch trans., E.P. Dutton & Co. 1951).
Id. at 1.
Id. at 2.
Translated, "I think therefore I am." RENE DESCARTES, DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD OF RIGHTLY CONDUCTING THE REASON AND SEEKING FOR TRUTH IN THE SCIENCES 21 (David Weissman ed., 1996).
See JOHN LOCKE, AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 9 (A.S. Pringle-Pattison ed., Humanities Press 1978) (explaining that "it is the understanding that sets man above the rest of sensible beings").
Locke was also a theist whose humanism led him to conclude that "the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men,.and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good or valid against it." JOHN LOCKE, TREATISE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT 90 (C.L. Sherman ed., 1937).
See JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971).
Rawls’s theory tries to avoid the philosophical question of the nature of the self. He does this by trying to maintain a neutral position on the ontological question, and instead attempts to advance a political theory that would accommodate various notions of the self. Id. at 18-19. His critics claim that Rawls, like Kant before him, fails in this effort. See MICHAEL J. SANDEL, LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE 11 (1982) (arguing that while Rawls envisions the principles of justice as emerging from deliberations, no real deliberation would be possible where the parties have no basis for disagreement); see also SEYLA BENHABIB, SITUATING THE SELF: GENDER, COMMUNITY, AND POSTMODERNISM 161-69 (1992).
RAWLS, supra note 29, at 141. The assumption Rawls makes is that "[i]f a knowledge of particulars is allowed, then the outcome is biased by arbitrary contingencies." Id.
Id.
SANDEL, supra note 30, at 129.
See infra Part IV (discussing the impact of the modern self on the law).
See RAWLS, supra note 29, at 3-4 (arguing that in a just society "[e]ach person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override"); SANDEL, supra note 30, at 2-7 (arguing that the concepts of self as independent of its object and of the right as prior to the good are essential to the deontological vision).
See supra notes 10-12 and accompanying text (discussing modern theories of self).
DAVID HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE 251 (L.A. Selby-Bigge ed., 1888).
Id. at 260. Hume felt that the memory actually produced identity by linking sensations that resembled one another. Id. at 260-61. Similarly, causation created a sense of identity in subjects and objects by ordering sensations, and "[a]s memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extent of this succession of perceptions, ’tis to be consider’d upon that account chiefly, as the source of personal identity." Id. at 261.
GEORG W.F. HEGEL, REASON IN HISTORY: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 31-34 (Robert S. Hartman trans., 1953).
LEWIS P. HINCHMAN, HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 33 (1984).
GOLDBERG, supra note 16, at 44; see also john a. powell, The "Racing" of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb Before Signifying as a Noun, 15 LAW & INEQ. J. 99, 110 (1997) (noting that European exaltation of the individual was adopted in part to distinguish White Europeans from non-White peoples organized around nonindividualistic norms).
In the epistemologies of modern philosophers, Christian conceptions of God played a central role. See, e.g., RENE DESCARTES, Meditations, in I PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DESCARTES 197-99 (E.S. Haldane & G.R.T. Ross trans., 1967).
GOLDBERG, supra note 16, at 16.
Id. at 55-56.
Id. at 33-34.
See, e.g., John O. Calmore, Racialized Space and the Culture of Segregation: "Hewing a Stone of Hope from a Mountain of Despair," 143 U. PA. L. REV. 1233, 1243-44 (1995) (noting characterizations of the inner city and the culture of poverty); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Anti-Discrimination Law, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1331, 1379 (1988) (stating that assumptions of cultural inferiority have replaced claims of racial inferiority).
W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK 8-9 (1995).
As James Boyle notes, there is a tension in writings on the self between the role of structure (or context) in defining the self and the agency or ability of the individual to self-define. James Boyle, Is Subjectivity Possible? The Postmodern Subject in Legal Theory, 62 U. COLO. L. REV. 489, 492 (1991). My belief is that both of these forces tell part of the story and that they are not mutually exclusive, but instead mutually limiting.
As I will argue later in the Essay, this is an unattainable ideal. See infra text accompanying note 144. The unitary self is an illusion that the dominant White male is able to maintain because of his central situating in modern discourse.
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to be Colored Me, in I LOVE MYSELF WHEN I AM LAUGHING 152-53 (Alice Walker ed., 1979).
Hurston’s fiction also reflects this notion of a discordance between self-perception and one’s identity as construed by the dominant discourse. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, at age six makes the following remarks upon viewing a photograph of herself for the first time:

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah was s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, "where is me? Ah don’t see me.’"

ZORA NEALE HURSTON, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 9 (1937).
Hurston, supra note 50, at 154.
FRANTZ FANON, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH 250 (1963).
This is provided, of course, that they do not transgress other constructed borders such as those of gender and sexuality.
What this invisibility masks is the myriad ways in which Whiteness has been defined and redefined in order to maintain the privileged status of Whites. In fact, given the scientific unreality of race, one can argue that to be White mostly means to be privileged. See generally powell, supra note 41, at 120-24 (discussing Whiteness as actually signifying privilege).
FRANTZ FANON, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS 116 (Charles L. Markmann trans., 1967). Elsewhere Fanon writes, "As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others." Id. at 109.
See generally MARILYN FRENCH, BEYOND POWER: ON WOMEN, MEN, AND MORALS 482-83 (1985); CAROL GILLIGAN, IN A DIFFERENT VOICE: PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY AND WOMEN’S DEVELOPMENT 6-8 (1982); Robin West, Jurisprudence and Gender, 55 U. CHI. L. REV. 1, 1-3 (1988).
See, e.g., Angela P. Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 581, 590-605 (1990) (critiquing Catharine MacKinnon’s dominance theory and Robin West’s "essential woman" theory).
Put another way, early feminists offered a very modern conception of the female self by acceding to Western society’s demand for total, not partial, explanations. Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, in FEMINISM/POSTMODERNISM 190, 202 (Linda J. Nicholson ed., 1990).
See, e.g., Catharine A. MacKinnon, FEMINISM UNMODIFIED: DISCOURSE ON LIFE AND LAW 16 (1987) (arguing that feminism must be "unqualified by pre-existing modifiers").
Harris, supra note 58, at 588.
An anthology on Black women’s studies makes this phenomenon explicit in its title: ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE, ALL THE BLACKS ARE MEN, BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE (Gloria Hull et al. eds., 1982)).
As will be discussed in greater detail later, this essentialized conception of discrimination also informed the manner in which the law addressed racism and sexism. See infra Part IV.
Grillo, supra note 8, at 18. Kimberlé Crenshaw provides a very explicit account of how the minority woman’s experience of intersectionality creates unique difficulties and contradictions in the legal and political spheres. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, 43 STAN. L. REV. 1241 (1993).
Harris, supra note 9, at 210.
Harris, supra note 58, at 584.
Grillo, supra note 8, at 17.
See supra notes 50-52 and accompanying text (noting Hurston’s sense of racial identity).
Ewing, supra note 9, at 251.
Id. at 255.
Id. at 251.
Id. at 253.
Id. at 270.
Id. at 270-71.
Harris, supra note 9, at 211.
Haraway, supra note 59, at 192.
Id. at 196-97.
Susan Stanford Friedman, Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse, in SIGNS 1, 7 (1995).
Id.
Id. at 17.
Dunning, supra note 17, at 133.
This concept equally applies to gender, sexual orientation, and other matrices of oppression. Haraway recognizes this when she refers to the "noninnocence of the category woman." Haraway, supra note 59, at 199. Amy Mullin makes a similar insight when she states: "Given that ours is still a racist, sexist, and homophobic society, it is easy to predict that self-mastery will become associated with mastery over people who are not white, as well as other women and homosexuals." Amy Mullin, Selves, Diverse and Divided: Can Feminists Have Diversity Without Multiplicity?, 10 HYPATIA 1, 7-8 (1995).
Crenshaw, supra note 46, at 1373.
Harris, supra note 58, at 608.
BALDWIN, supra note 1, at 690.
Ruth Frankenberg, Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture, and Nation in White Women’s Life Narratives, in RACE 62, 63 (Steven Gregory & Roger Sanjek eds., 1994).
See infra Part IV.
MORRISON, supra note 5, at 34-38.
Id. at 34-35.
Id. at 38.
Id. at 6.
See generally DALLYMAYR, TWILIGHT OF SUBJECTIVITY (1981) (discuss-ing the role of language and context in the development of the self); FOUCAULT, supra note 3. Haraway, who identifies herself as materialist, places a similar primacy on the role of language and information systems and claims that the key to displacing the modern project "rests on a theory of language and controls." Haraway, supra note 59, at 206.
Boyle, supra note 48, at 500.
Ewing, supra note 9, at 259 (citations omitted).
Id. at 268.
See supra note 61 and accompanying text (discussing Harris’s mathematical formula).
Mullin, supra note 82, at 1-2.
Mullin describes the multiple self as the theory that the self is "composed of relatively fixed or agent-like aspects or parts." Id. at 2.
Id. at 8.
Id. at 20.
Id. at 17.
Ewing, supra note 9, at 257.
Id. at 274. Others have not been so accepting of psychoanalysis. For example, Jane Flax criticizes Freudian theory on the ground that it "assumes that individual humans all share an essence with a common developmental pattern and that this pattern is or should be rational, sequential, purposive and additive." Jane Flax, Multiple: On the Contemporary Politics of Subjectivity, 16 HUMAN STUDIES 33, 38 (1993). Flax goes on to assert that "[n]aturalizing and universalizing this developmental history obscures its fictive qualities and prescriptive purposes." Id.
THOMAS H. OGDEN, SUBJECTS OF ANALYSIS 14 (1994).
Others have embellished upon Freud’s theories of internal functionings to posit much more radically situated selves. For example, Carl Jung maintained that the self was composed of a multitude of daimons, archetypal historical figures of varying genders, races, and even species that all functioned to constitute the individual self. JAMES HILLMON, HEALING FICTION 53-70 (1983).
Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, 39 STAN. L. REV. 317, 331 (1987).
OGDEN, supra note 104, at 18 ("The subject for Freud is to be sought in the phenomenology corresponding to that which lies in the relations between the consciousness and unconsciousness.").
Id. at 7.
Id. at 20.
Id. at 21.
Lawrence, supra note 106, at 331-32.
See OGDEN, supra note 104, at 63 (noting Ogden’s conception of analytic intersubjectivity, which places central emphasis on its dialectical nature). Ogden uses the examples of infant and mother, and analyst and analysand, asserting that in these dialectical pairs the existence of one is dependent upon the existence of the other. Id. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein asserts that the self is actually "decentered from its exclusive locus within the individual; instead the subject is conceived of as arising in a dialectic (a dialogue) of self and Other." Id. at 47.
Id. at 44.
Some have situated Freud between the romantic and the rationalist, or between the modern and the postmodern. ROBERT JAY LIFTON, THE PROTEAN SELF: HUMAN RESILIENCE IN AN AGE OF FRAGMENTATION 24 (1993).
Lawrence, supra note 106, at 322-23.
Lawrence illustrates this point by referring to the controversy created when sportscaster Howard Cosell referred to a Black football player as a "monkey." See id. at 339-40 (discussing the Cosell comment as an example of unconscious racism in everyday life). Accepting that Cosell was not racist in any willful respect and that he certainly could only be harmed by engaging in deliberately racist behavior, Lawrence notes the unmistakably racist undertones in Cosell’s choice of metaphor. See id. at 340 (arguing that Cosell’s "inadvertent slip of the tongue was not random., [but] evidence of the continuing presence of a derogatory racial stereotype that he [had] repressed from consciousness and that [had] momentarily slipped past his Ego’s censors").
See supra Part II.C (introducing the concept of the multi-racial self).
Lawrence, supra note 106, at 333-34. This framework of analysis also provides insight into Toni Morrison’s account of the role of Blacks in American literature and her assertion that slavery was a possibly indispensable corollary to the freedom of White Americans. See MORRISON, supra note 5, at 38.
Lawrence, supra note 106, at 333-34.
See infra Part IV.
See generally BENHABIB, supra note 30, at 2 (addressing "what is living and what is dead in universalist moral and political theories of the present, after their criticism in the hands of communitarians, feminists, and postmodernists"); BERNSTEIN, supra note 11, at 18-20.
ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN, MEETING THE GREAT BLISS QUEEN: BUDDHISTS, FEMINISTS AND THE ART OF THE SELF 140 (1995).
Id. at 127.
Id. at 136.
While Buddhists agree that self-consciousness is largely put together by language, they also believe that the process of self-consciousness starts at a pre-language level. Id. at 11.
For example, neo-Buddhist Serge-Christophe Kolm describes the construction of the self in terms strikingly similar to those of Hume’s referenced earlier:

One begins by acknowledging that a person is composed of several elements. The profane person would see this as a "decomposition" of the still perceptible person into several elements. One would then make him see that what he believed to be a person is only this set of elements that he stubbornly persisted in regarding as a whole...

Serge-Christophe Kolm, The Buddhist Theory of "No-self," in THE MULTIPLE SELF 233, 255 (Jon Elster ed., 1985).
KLEIN, supra note 122, at 11.
It may be that the essentialism debate is analogous to the scientific debate over whether light is a wave or a particle. The possibilities that something is constructed either of particles or waves were considered mutually exclusive. So the question arises, is light made up of particles or is light made up of waves? It turns out that if the experiment designed to answer this question is set up to measure waves, then light is found to be a wave. Conversely, if the experiment is designed to measure particles, then light is found to be made up of particles. JEREMY M. HAYWARD, SHIFTING WORLDS, CHANGING MINDS: WHERE THE SCIENCES AND BUDDHISM MEET 18 (1987). Thus, the parameters of the question "What is light?" are found to be inconsistent with the true nature of light. Light is composed of both waves and particles. Similarly, Buddhism asserts that the parameters of the essentialist/ nonessentialist debate are flawed in that both "antinomes" are in part correct. Moreover, how we ask and verify the question does not just affect the answer we arrive at, but reality itself. Our questions and methods of observing the world participate in the world we are observing. Thus, the answer to the question, "Is there anything in the world essential or is everything unessential?" may be that it depends.
Id. at 132.
KLEIN, supra note 122, at 81.
Id. at 80.
Id. This insight applies with equal force to minorities and others whose senses of self are problematized by popular discourses.
Id. at 81.
Id. at 80.
SANDEL, supra note 30, at 1. See generally notes 29-35 and accompanying text (discussing Rawls’s theories).
RAWLS, supra note 29, at 12.
Boyle, supra note 48, at 507. Flax also posits that "[t]his metanarrative requires a certain form of subject—an undetermined one, who can be the discoverer of truth. It requires a particular view of reality—rational, orderly and accessible to and through our thought." Flax, supra note 103, at 35.
Grillo, supra note 8, at 17.
SANDEL, supra note 30, at 109.
Crenshaw, supra note 46, at 1353.
Peter Gabel, The Phenomenology of Rights-Consciousness and the Pact of the Withdrawn Selves, 62 TEX. L. REV. 1563, 1564 (1984).
See supra Part II.A (explaining the theory of the intersectional self).
For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 treats sources of discrimination as theoretically distinct by declaring: "[I]t shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer.to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1) (1994) (emphasis added).
See supra notes 92-96 and accompanying text.
See generally BALDWIN, supra note 1; powell, supra note 41, at 105-06.
powell, supra note 41, at 112-14; see also JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY 147-49 (1990).
For a discussion of the use of categories and the law, see infra Part IV.C.
Conversely, others have accepted multiplicity of the self and used it to advocate a newfound sense of agency and self-creation:

[D]on’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture.

GLORIA ANZALDUA, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA 22 (1987).
BUTLER, supra note 146, at 147.
See, e.g., Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 239 (1976) (requiring discriminatory intent to state a racial equal protection claim under the fourteenth amendment).
Lawrence, supra note 106, at 323.
Id. at 322.
Under this rubric of analysis, one understands the assertions that historical racism and race-conscious remedies such as affirmative action are equally abhorrent.
Grillo, supra note 8, at 18-19.
At least one court, however, has softened its stance on the notion of a single original position. Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc., 760 F. Supp. 1486, 1524 (M.D. Fla. 1991) (applying a "reasonable woman" standard to a claim of memployment discrimination).
See DAVID ABRAM, THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS: PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE IN A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD 38 (1996).
Toni Morrison makes this point explicit when she describes the interdependence of racial identities in the definition of the White American ethos. See supra note 5 and accompanying text.
Mullin, supra note 82, at 22.
Martha Mahoney, Segregation, Whiteness and Transformation, 143 U. PA. L. REV. 1659, 1659 (1995).
As Goldberg argues, "The poverty of the inner city infrastructure provides a racial sign of complex social disorders, of their manifestation when in fact it is their cause." GOLDBERG, supra note 16, at 197.
See generally THEODORE W. ALLEN, THE INVENTION OF THE WHITE RACE, VOLUME ONE: RACIAL OPPRESSION AND SOCIAL CONTROL (1994); MORRISON, supra note 5.
See generally DAVID ROEDIGER, TOWARDS THE ABOLITION OF WHITENESS (1994); Frankenberg, supra note 86.
The power of racial discourse in the sanctity of the self can be seen in how "slaveholders from the 17th century onward created and politicized racial categories to maintain the support of non-slaveholding whites, . .convinc[ing] whites to support a system that was opposed to their own economic interests." Crenshaw, supra note 46, at 1374.
It is interesting to note that some 43 years ago the law recognized the stigmatic effect racism has upon individual development, but has failed to use this recognition to inform its practices. See Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 483 (1954). The relational, constitutive self mandates that we remember the stigma identified in Brown and also recognize the privilege that is buttressed by this stigmatization.
Some psychoanalysts would go even further and assert that the tendency to categorize is a universal byproduct of the human need to understand experience. See, e.g., Lawrence, supra note 106, at 337.
Flax, supra note 103, at 40. Harris has vividly illustrated this point, stating that "avoiding gender essentialism need not mean that the Holocaust and a corncob are the same." Harris, supra note 58, at 586.
David Abram provides a cogent discussion of the difference between scientific and experiental truth, and the power of the latter despite its subjective nature. ABRAM, supra note 156, at 32.
Sandel makes a similar point:

The bonds between the self and (some) others are thus relaxed on the intersubjective account, but not so completely relaxed as to give way to a radically situated subject. The bonds that remain are not given to physical bodily differences between human beings, but by the capacity of the self through reflection to participate in the constitution of its identity, and where circumstances permit, to arrive at an expansive self-understanding.

SANDEL, supra note 30, at 144.
Id. As Haraway notes, this means that we abandon the quest for total explanations and instead seek "making partial, real connections." Haraway, supra note 59, at 202-03.
Flax, supra note 103, at 41.
Haraway, supra note 59, at 211.
Harris, supra note 58, at 586.

University of Minnesota Law School • 415 Law Center 229 19th Avenue South • Minneapolis, MN 55455
Telephone: (612) 625-8071 • Fax: (612) 624-8890

e-mail: irp@tc.umn.edu • Internet: http://www1.umn.edu/irp