Gender and the Law Blog

School Book Removals May Create Hostile Environment Violating Student Civil Rights

Wash Post, Book Removals May Have Violated Student Civil Rights, Education Dept. Says

In a move that could affect how schools handle book challenges, the federal government has concluded that a Georgia school district’s removal of titles with Black and LGBTQ characters may have created a “hostile environment” for students, potentially violating their civil rights.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released its findings in a letter Friday wrapping up its investigation into Forsyth County Schools’ 2022 decision to pull nearly a dozen books from shelves after parents complained of titles’ sexual and LGBTQ content. To resolve the investigation, the district north of Atlanta agreed to offer “supportive measures” to students affected by the book removals and to administer a school climate survey, per the letter. ***

The Education Department’s investigation into the Forsyth district — which involved the examination of school documents, interviews with top school personnel and a review of public board meeting records — was based on a complaint alleging that the January 2022 removal of books created a “racially and sexually hostile environment for students,” according to the department.

The district ultimately removed eight books indefinitely and two temporarily, according to the letter, and it limited four titles to high schools. Superintendent Jeff Bearden told the school board that the books being yanked “were obviously sexually explicit or pornographic,” according to the letter.

Of the books listed for removal, three center on characters of color and one on an LGBTQ protagonist, according to a Washington Post analysis. The nixed titles include “The Bluest Eye” by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, the Forsyth County News reported and Caracciolo confirmed.

A study by the Washington Post found that the majority of all school book bans are being filed by a small number of people. See Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges

A small number of people were responsible for most of the book challenges, The Post found. Individuals who filed 10 or more complaints were responsible for two-thirds of all challenges. In some cases, these serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.

And the types of claims:

The Post analyzed the complaints to determine who was challenging the books, what kinds of books drew objections and why. Nearly half of filings — 43 percent — targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism. The top reason people challenged books was “sexual” content; 61 percent of challenges referenced this concern.

In nearly 20 percent of the challenges, petitioners wrote that they wanted texts pulled from shelves because the titles depict lesbian, gay, queer, bisexual, homosexual, transgender or nonbinary lives. Many challengers wrote that reading books about LGBTQ people could cause children to alter their sexuality or gender.

 

Dobbs, Plessy, and the New Jane Crow

Evan D. Bernick, Dobbs, Plessy, and the Constitution of the New Jane Crow,  Northern Illinois U. Law Rev. (2023)

Women and girls enter U.S. jails and prisons every year. Nearly a million are on probation, parole, or pretrial release. This carceral control is unevenly distributed, being primarily exercised over poor women of color. And it is growing. These realities are part of what has been conceptualized as “the New Jane Crow.”

This Essay contends that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. gives the New Jane Crow the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional blessing. In justifying its decision to overrule Roe v. Wade and hold that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect the right to terminate a pregnancy, Dobbs invokes Plessy v. Ferguson and its overruling by Brown v. Board of Education. The profound evil of Plessy’s constitutional endorsement of “separate but equal” railcars and its legitimation of Jim Crow segregation is said to illustrate the importance of overruling egregiously wrong precedents. But Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court in Dobbs has more in common with Plessy than its author recognizes.

Part I provides an overview of the New Jane Crow, tracing the genealogy of the phrase and describing the phenomenon that it names. Though provocative, I argue that the phrase fits the phenomenon, given substantive and functional continuities between state control of female reproduction past and present. Part II describes how Dobbs constitutionally legitimates key components of the New Jane Crow and encourages its expansion.

Part III analogizes Dobbs to Plessy in three respects. First, in its disregard of relevant history. Second, in its lack of attention to present socioeconomic realities. Third, in its capacity to provide constitutional legitimation to an entire political-economic order that perpetuates racialized and gendered subordination.

The Supreme Court's Gaslight Docket and the Anti-Equality Effects

Kyle Velte, The Supreme Court's Gaslight Docket, Temple L. Rev. (forthcoming) 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority is gaslighting the American public. This article take a systematic look at key cases from the Court’s October Term 2021 through the lens of gaslighting. It describes these case as being part of what it dubs the Court’s “gaslight docket,” a descriptor that provides a useful and potentially unifying theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the Court’s recent onslaught of rights-diminishing precedents.

The concept of gaslighting gained cultural purchase in the 1944 film Gaslight. Since then, the concept has become to subject of academic and theoretical inquiry. This article identifies gaslighting in the Court’s civil rights cases in both oral arguments and written decisions. It reveals that this gaslighting is trans-substantive, spanning cases involving voting rights, race discrimination/affirmative action, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

Because gaslighting has epistemic dimensions — knowledge production and gaslighting are connected — gaslighters instill epistemic doubt in their victims as a way to have the gaslighter’s production of knowledge “count” and to dismiss as unfounded other understandings of the world. The U.S. Supreme Court is an especially powerful “knower” — indeed, it is given the position of ultimate “knower” of the meaning and application of the U.S. Constitution. With each case it decides, the Court produces legal knowledge in the form of rules that must be followed in similar subsequent cases.

The results of the October 2021 term were astounding. Across multiple substantive areas, the Court issued decidedly anti-equality and anti-democratic decisions that threaten the promise of equal citizenship for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. In so doing, the Court elevated the interests of the white Christian nationalism movement, declaring that those interests are not co-equal with the interests of marginalized groups but instead are interests that will be treated as “most favored” by the Court.

After describing the academic literature on gaslighting, the article applies the gaslighting analytical frame to a sampling of recent Supreme Court civil rights cases. It argues that the gaslighting framework does important work in revealing an alarming trend of privileging white Christian nationalism ideals at the expense of the rights of marginalized communities. It explains why the gaslighting framing matters for civil rights advocates across causes and proposes ways in which movement lawyers and movement judges can expose this oppressive move by the Court, learn from it, and counter it.

Book, Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights

Valena Betty, Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights

When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help victims, they frequently relied on false information, forensic fraud, and police and prosecutor misconduct.
 
Seeking change, Beety began working in the Innocence Movement, helping to free factually innocent people through DNA testing and criminal justice reform. Manifesting Justice focuses on the shocking story of Beety's client Leigh Stubbs—a young, queer woman in Mississippi, convicted of a horrific crime she did not commit because of her sexual orientation. Beety weaves Stubbs's harrowing narrative through the broader story of a broken criminal justice system where defendants—including disproportionate numbers of women of color and queer individuals—are convicted due to racism, prejudice, coerced confessions, and false identifications.
 
Drawing on interviews with both innocence advocates and wrongfully convicted women, along with Beety's own experiences as an expert litigator and a queer woman, Manifesting Justice provides a unique outsider/insider perspective. Beety expands our notion of justice to include not just people who are factually innocent, but those who are over-charged, pressured into bad plea deals, and over-sentenced. The result is a riveting and timely book that not only advocates for reforming the conviction process—it will transform our very ideas of crime and punishment, what innocence is, and who should be free.

 

Meera Deo on "Better than BIPOC"

Meera Deo has published Better than BIPOC in volume 41 of Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice (2023). The abstract is here: 

 

Race and racism evolve over time, as does the language of antiracism. Yet nascent terms of resistance are not always better than originals. Without the deep investment of community engagement and review, new labels—like BIPOC—run the risk of causing more harm than good. This Article argues that using BIPOC (which stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”) as a synonym for People of Color not only does a disservice to the People of Color history and legacy, but also is a dangerous example of virtue signaling that promises symbolic progress without meaningful change. Applying this thesis to the context of legal education using empirical data from law students and law faculty, it becomes evident that People of Color is the appropriate term to use when making comparisons to whites; similarly, Women of Color works best when considering raceXgender intersectionality. Furthermore, academics, advocates, and allies should recognize that while pursuing commonalities and drawing from shared experiences is often critical for political and strategic purposes, aggregating disparate groups under one umbrella, whatever term is used, risks obscuring marginalized populations. In these instances, we should be even more precise in naming each community individually, which serves the twin goals of promoting accuracy in reporting and furthering anti-subordination.

Urgent Appeal and Call to Action Sent to U.N. Explaining how U.S. Anti-Abortion Legislation Violates International Law

A coalition of groups, including Human Rights Watch, Pregnancy Justice, the National Birth Equity Collaborative, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the Global Justice Center, have authored a letter to United Nations mandate holders. The letter issues an urgent appeal and call to action: 

By overturning the established constitutional protection for access to abortion and through the passage of state laws, the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law, codified in a number of human rights treaties to which it is a party or a signatory. These human rights obligations include, but are not limited to, the rights to: life; health; privacy; liberty and security of person; to be free from torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief; equality and non-discrimination; and to seek, receive, and impart information.

 

The signatories call on the UN mandate holders to take up their calls to action, which include communicating with the US regarding the human rights violations, requesting a visit to the US, convening a virtual stakeholder meeting with US civil society, calls for the US to comply with its obligations under international law, and calls for private companies to take a number of actions to protect reproductive rights.

The full 53-page appeal is available here. It outlines all of the ways that women's health and lives are threatened by the Dobbs decision. The letter is signed by dozens of organizations and individuals. It is a great, comprehensive resource for advocates. 

Etienne C. Toussaint on "The Purpose of Legal Education"

Etienne C. Toussaint has posted forthcoming work on SSRN titled The Purpose of Legal Education. This article is to be published in Volume 111 of the California Law Review (2023). The abstract previews:  

 

When President Donald Trump launched an assault on diversity training, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project in September 2020 as “divisive, un-American propaganda,” many law students were presumably confused. After all, law school has historically been doctrinally neutral, racially homogenous, and socially hierarchical. In most core law school courses, colorblindness and objectivity trump critical legal discourse on issues of race, gender, or sexuality. Yet, such disorientation reflects a longstanding debate over the fundamental purpose of law school. As U.S. law schools develop antiracist curricula and expand their experiential learning programs to produce so-called practice-ready lawyers for the crises exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars continue to question whether and how, if at all, the purpose of law school converges with so

 

This Article argues that the anti-racist, democratic, and movement lawyering principles advocated by progressive legal scholars should not be viewed merely as aspirational ideals for social justice law courses. Rather, querying whether legal systems and political institutions further racism, economic oppression, or social injustice must be viewed as endemic to the fundamental purpose of legal education. In so doing, this Article makes three important contributions to the literature on legal education and philosophical legal ethics. First, it clarifies how two ideologies—functionalism and neoliberalism—have threatened to drift law school’s historic public purpose away from the democratic norms of public citizenship, inflicting law students, law faculty, and the legal academy with an existential identity crisis. Second, it explores historical mechanisms of institutional change within law schools that reveal diverse notions of law school’s purpose as historically contingent. Such perspectives are shaped by the behaviors, cultural attitudes, and ideological beliefs of law faculty operating within particular social, political, and economic contexts. Third, and finally, it demonstrates the urgency of moving beyond liberal legalism in legal education by integrating critical legal theories and movement law principles throughout the entire law school curriculum.

 

 

Study Shows Hierarchy, Race and Gender Impact Scholarly Networks and Who is Helped on Their Legal Academic Path

Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price II & Jonathan Tietz, Hierarchy Race and Gender in Legal Scholarly Networks, 75 Stanford Law Review 71 (Feb. 2023)

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgments paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those factors. The landscape we illustrate is depressingly unsurprising in basic contours but awash in details. Hierarchy, race, and gender all have substantial effects on who gets acknowledged and how, what networks of knowledge co-production get formed, and who is helped on their path through the legal academic world.

Thalia González and Rebecca Epstein on "Critical Race Feminism, Health, and Restorative Practice in Schools: Centering the Experiences of Black and Latina Girls"

Thalia González and Rebecca Epstein have posted their article on SSRN: Critical Race Feminism, Health, and Restorative Practice in Schools: Centering the Experiences of Black and Latina Girls, 29 Michigan J. of Gender & Law (2022). The abstract provides: 

 

Restorative practices (RP) in K-12 schools in the United States have grown exponentially since the early 1990s. Developing against a backdrop of systemic racism, RP has become embedded in education practice and policy to counteract the harmful and persistent patterns of disparities in school discipline experienced by students of color. Within this legal, social, and political context, the empirical evidence that has been gathered on school-based restorative justice has framed and named RP as a behavioral intervention aimed at reducing discipline incidents—that is, an “alternative” to punitive and exclusionary practices. While this view of RP is central to dismantling discriminatory systems, we argue it reflects an unnecessarily limited understanding of its potential and has generated unintended consequences in the field of RP research. First, the reactive RP model of analysis focuses more exclusively on behavioral change, rather than systemic improvement, to address discipline disparities. Second, RP research has insufficiently examined the potential role of RP in achieving health justice. Third, RP research too rarely engages in intersectional analyses that critically examine gendered racism. This study is intended as a course correction. Building on the work of legal scholars, public health researchers, sociologists, restorative justice practitioners, and our own prior work, this original study is the first to examine non-disciplinary RP through a critical race feminist lens, and—just as importantly—a public health praxis. Our findings reveal that the interplay between RP and adolescent health, race, and gender can no longer be overlooked. Proactive non-disciplinary RP was found to promote supportive school environments that enhance five key protective health factors for Black and Latina girls. Additionally, results indicate that RP improved the mental health and wellbeing of Black and Latina girls, building fundamental resilience skills that can help overcome the complex array of social structures that serve to disempower and disenfranchise girls and harm their educational and health outcomes.

Injustice Watch Investigation of U Visa Denials in Chicago

Injustice Watch reported on Chicago police denied scores of undocumented crime victims a path to citizenship. 

 

An Injustice Watch investigation found that the department has denied hundreds of U visa certification requests from undocumented crime victims this year, many of them at odds with federal certification standards and some that appeared to violate state law.

Two Chicago police sergeants, Brandon Ternand and John Poulos, issued most of the denials reviewed by Injustice Watch. Both sergeants have fatally shot civilians and had serious questions raised by investigators about their credibility. Both also faced termination, but in 2018 the Chicago Police Board allowed them to keep their jobs. The city has paid out more than $3 million in settlements and judgments relating to the two sergeants.

Police watchdogs said the decision to designate Ternand and Poulos as U visa certifiers raises questions about CPD’s selection process for the job.

* * *  

[A]fter Injustice Watch started reporting this story and following weeks of complaints from immigration attorneys to officials in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office, sources said that CPD said it would revise its policies on U visa certifications. The most significant change will require the department’s Office of Legal Affairs to review all denials as well as handle appeals of previously denied requests.

The City Council is also considering calling for hearings on this issue seeking more transparency.  

New Study on "The Impact of Legal Abortion on Maternal Mortality"

A new study analyzing The Impact of Legal Abortion on Maternal Mortality was posted to SSRN by scholars Sherajum Farin, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, and Michael Pesko. The conclusion describes the results of their study: 

In this study, we consider whether the 1960s and 1970s legalization of abortion in the United States led to improvements in maternal health. Our findings suggest that legal abortion reduced non-white abortion-related mortality by 30-60% and non-white maternal mortality by 30-40%. In the first year after the passage of legal abortion, this percentage decline translates into 41 non-white maternal deaths averted in early-legal states and 113 non-white maternal deaths averted nationally. To ground the magnitude of the deaths averted in present-day maternal deaths, a total of 299 non-white women died from maternal causes of death in 2019, despite a broader classification of maternal deaths today. * * * [T]he estimated decline in maternal mortality represents the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of the health effects of legal abortion * * *.

 

In an era where Roe v. Wade no longer determines abortion laws in the United States, we conclude with two facts worth considering for policy today. First, during the period of our study, legal abortion acts primarily through lower abortion-related deaths, rather than a change in pregnancy-related risk factors. The importance of abortion-related maternal mortality indicates that eliminating unsafe and illegal abortion was likely the main driver of mortality declines discovered in this study. Second, legal abortion appears most important for non-white women, and also has the largest impact in counties with lower levels of income, educational attainment, and healthcare resources. Put together, the impact of legal abortion shows marked heterogeneous impacts by race and socioeconomic status, where legal abortion appears most important for less advantaged groups.

 

Still, based on these observed facts, the maternal mortality impacts of a post-Roe v. Wade legal landscape are unclear. A number of factors are different today than in the 1970s. Most notably, the availability of medical abortion, which can be prescribed through telemedicine appointments, sent through the mail, and safely administered at home * * * Instead, we conclude by emphasizing the importance of legal abortion for non-white maternal health during the period of initial legalization. Today, in the U.S., non-Hispanic black women already suffer three times the maternal mortality of white women * * * , and if there is a health impact of legal abortion restrictions, it will likely be for this group.

NALP Publishes its Annual Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms

The National Association of Law Placement has published its 2022 data on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms.

The introduction outlines the findings and conclusions of this important annual report: 

Overall, women and people of color continued to make measured progress in representation at major U.S. law firms in 2022 as compared with 2021, according to the latest demographic findings from the analyses of the 2022 NALP Directory of Legal Employers (NDLE) — the annual compendium of legal employer data published by NALP. At the associate level, women now make up almost half of all associates — and will soon likely become the majority based on the summer associate demographics — where women have surpassed the 50% threshold for the past 5 years.

 

By race/ethnicity, Black associates saw the biggest year-over-year increase in representation, up by more than half of a percentage point to 5.77% of all associates. Likewise, Black summer associates saw large gains this year, increasing by 0.7 percentage points to 11.85% of all summer associates. The share of summer associates who are women and/or people of color continues to exceed that of associates by 6-15 percentage points, suggesting that the associate ranks will persist in their diversification over the next few years.

 

Progress at the partnership level has moved at a more sluggish pace, particularly for women of color. Black and Latinx women each continued to account for less than 1% of all partners in 2022. The percentage of Black partners overall increased by just 0.1 percentage points, from 2.22% of all partners in 2021 to 2.32%. Latinx partners experienced a similar increase, growing from 2.86% of all partners in 2021 to 2.97% in 2022. 

Interview with Author of New Shirley Chisholm Biography

The 19th features an interview of historian Anastasia Curwood on her new biography of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.  The article explains why a "cradle to grave" biography about Chisholm is so important: 

Shirley Chisholm was a trailblazer: the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black candidate and the first woman candidate for a major-party nomination for president of the United States. Still, despite her tremendous influence on American politics, biographies of Chisholm have been immensely hard to come across. 

With her recently released book, “Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics,” Anastasia C. Curwood, a professor and interim chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky, hopes to alleviate this gap. A cradle-to-grave biography as Curwood calls it, the book gives insight into who Chisholm was as a person and how Chisolm’s many lived experiences and multiple identities shaped who she was. In the book, Curwood coins the term “Black Feminist Power Politics” to describe how Chisholm’s identity as a Black woman born to immigrant parents in a working-class family allowed her to empathize with the lived experiences of marginalized individuals and informed her politics. 

The 19th article features an interview with the author describing many themes of the book. The book was published on January 10, 2023. 

Book Author Interview, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

Strict Scrutiny, Author Interview, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

Tomiko Brown-Nagin joins Melissa and Kate to discuss her book Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. You may recognize the name Constance Baker Motley from Ketanji Brown Jackson’s speech upon receiving her nomination to SCOTUS. Motley was the first black woman to be appointed to the federal bench– and she and Justice Jackson share a birthday. Judge Motley’s story illustrates the fights for equality, across race and gender lines, in the mid-20th century.

Expansions in California's Abundant Birth Project

The United States' first program giving cash to pregnant Black women in San Francisco has expanded to four additional counties. California's Abundant Birth Project is described as: 

The Abundant Birth Project is a simple, yet novel, approach to achieving better maternal health and birthing outcomes: provide pregnant Black and Pacific Islander women a monthly income supplement for the duration of their pregnancy and during the postpartum period as an economic and reproductive health intervention. Prematurity is a leading cause of infant mortality and has been linked to lifelong conditions, such as behavioral development issues, learning difficulties, and chronic disease. In San Francisco, Black infants are almost twice as likely to be born prematurely compared with White infants (13.8% versus 7.3%, from 2012-2016) and Pacific Islander infants have the second-highest preterm birth rate (10.4%). Furthermore, Black families account for half of the maternal deaths and over 15% of infant deaths, despite representing only 4% of all births. Pacific Islander families face similar disparities.

San Francisco Mayor, London N. Breed, celebrated the launch of the program stating:  

“Providing guaranteed income support to mothers during pregnancy is an innovative and equitable approach that will ease some of the financial stress that all too often keeps women from being able to put their health first. The Abundant Birth Project is rooted in racial justice and recognizes that Black and Pacific Islander mothers suffer disparate health impacts, in part because of the persistent wealth and income gap. Thanks to the work of the many partners involved, we are taking real action to end these disparities and are empowering mothers with the resources they need to have healthy pregnancies and births.”

Daisy Nguyen, reporter with KQED.org, reported on the expansion of the program.  

Since June 2021, the Abundant Birth Project has given $1,000 per month to nearly 150 Black residents during a portion of their pregnancies and the first six months of their children’s lives. With the extra funding from the California Department of Social Services and another $1.5 million in city funds, the program aims to reach another 525 people in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

Learn more about the Abundant Birth Project here.  

The Black-White Paradigm and the Continuing Erasure of Latinas as Law Deans

Laura Padilla, The Black-White Paradigm's Continuing Erasure of Latinas: See Women Law Deans of Color, 99 Denver L. Rev. 683 (2022)

The Black-white paradigm persists with unintended consequences. For example, there have been only six Latina law deans to date with only four presently serving. This Article provides data about women law deans of color, the dearth of Latina law deans, and explanations for the data. It focuses on the enduring Black-white paradigm, as well as other external and internal forces. This Article suggests how to increase the number of Latina law deans and emphasizes why it matters.

Artist Michelle Browder Honoring the "Mothers of Gynecology" with a New Museum and Clinic

Daja E. Henry with the 19th News has written about how A new museum and clinic will honor the enslaved "Mothers of Gynecology." This site is expected to break ground on Mother's Day 2023. It sits less than a mile away from Alabama's state capitol. The project will convert James Marion Sims' makeshift hospital into a $5.5MM museum that will include a clinic and training facilities for midwives, doulas, and medical students. The site will honor the enslaved women and girls who "shed blood for the creation of American gynecology, despite their inability to consent." The artist is Michelle Browder. Author, Daja Henry, writes the following about the project: 

Browder plans to expand a two-story building that has stood there since the late 1800s and add a third floor, which will house the Mothers of Gynecology Health and Wellness Clinic. The clinic will be a primary care unit that helps women who cannot afford those services, while also providing a space for doulas, midwives and OB-GYNs to collaborate to offer solutions to end the maternal health crisis.

* * *  

Sims, a well-respected figure in American medicine, is known for inventing the speculum and the Sims position, which are both used during gynecological examinations. To arrive at those advances, he purchased and leased enslaved women, whom he operated on without anesthesia, to perfect treatments for White women. For five years, they labored at Sims’ side and under his torturous hand. They were the subjects of dozens of procedures with no anesthesia. They were also tasked with holding each other down and assisting with the procedures, along with the typical work of an enslaved woman. Anarcha [one of the girls honored in a prior art work of Bowder's] underwent at least 30 surgeries during Sims’ experimentation. She was 17 years old at the time of her first surgery. 

* * * 

Today’s maternal health care crisis that is killing Black women and babies is a natural continuation of the science birthed from violence, experts said. The mistreatment of Black people and their bodies has been there every step of the way. 

Conference and CFP, Equal Justice Under Law?

American University, Annual Symposium, Equal Justice Under Law

CFP Deadline Jan. 3, 2023

2023 Annual Symposium: Equal Justice Under Law?

On February 3, 2023, the American University Law Review's 2023 Annual Symposium—Equal Justice Under Law?—will explore what is left of the Constitution after the 2021-2022 U.S. Supreme Court term. The Law Review is thrilled to announce that Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will be this year's Keynote Speaker. Dean Chemerinsky is a distinguished scholar and has authored fourteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. Additionally, the Law Review will host multiple Supreme Court practitioners as panelists this year to weigh in on the Court's recent term and the questions it raises moving forward.

Call for Papers: American University Law Review’s 2023 Annual Symposium

Download PDF Here!

The American University Law Review is placing a call for submissions of original legal articles and scholarly commentaries for its forthcoming Annual Symposium issue, this year dedicated to a review and response to the 2021 through 2022 Supreme Court term and the upcoming term. Specifically, the Law Review seeks submissions analyzing the rapidly evolving response to the Supreme Court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin, Shurtleff v. City of Boston, and pending cases before the Supreme Court in the next term on affirmative action, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and free speech. Approximately four to six submissions will be selected, with a publication date slated for the spring of 2023.

Gendered and Racialized Emotional Labor in Public Organizations

Cynthia Barboza-Wilkes, REPRODUCING INEQUITY IN ORGANIZATIONS: GENDERED AND RACIALIZED EMOTIONAL LABOR IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS, PhD Thesis (USC School of Public Policy) 

Emotional labor research in public administration lags behind other fields, is often omitted from discussions of representative bureaucracy, and rarely looks at its gendered and racialized dimensions. The existing scholarship fails to consider the dynamic nature of emotions and that different emotions (e.g., happiness versus anger) might warrant different emotional labor techniques for different groups. Meanwhile, scholars from sociology, applied psychology, and organizational behavior widely recognize the importance of emotional labor, but few have used an intersectional lens to study the well-recognized phenomenon.

This dissertation uses an intersectional approach to codify the difficult-to-measure and often unobserved emotional labor that can institutionalize inequity within public organizations. An intersectional approach is essential to make visible the experiences of those at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, and this dissertation describes in detail how the antecedents, experiences, and consequences of emotional labor differ based on the employee’s combination of gender and racial identity. Using a mixed-methods research design that combines daily diary entries and semi-structured interviews, this work (1) describes and measures the emotional labor embedded in both service encounters with the public and internal interactions among colleagues, (2) looks at subgroup differences in the emotional effort at the intersection of race and gender, and (3) assesses the relationship between emotional labor and burnout to inform our understanding of the well-being of a diverse public sector workforce.

I find meaningful differences within and between individuals in the emotions needed to effectively engage the public and navigate public institutions. The results reveal that, compared to their peers, women of color engage in more taxing forms of emotional labor, feel more emotionally constrained by organizational rules, are more cognizant of managing gendered and racialized stereotypes, and are more sensitive to whether the climate allows for authentic expression. I also show that public employees experienced heightened burnout during the pandemic, and the suppression of emotion contributed to that burnout, but in different ways for different groups. In particular, women of color who suppressed negative emotions were more likely to experience a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, increased cynicism, disengagement from their work, and more emotional exhaustion.

This project reveals important distinctions in the type of emotional labor demanded of public employees and how those emotional demands differ across gender and racial identities. The results make visible the experiences of those at the margins of multiple lived experiences of oppression, allowing women of color to articulate their own emotional experiences in ways that center their voices. Importantly, this work highlights the importance of factoring emotional labor into the experience of burnout at work while emphasizing that the relationship between the two varies for individuals of different backgrounds. I provide concrete proof that there is an uneven distribution of emotional labor in public organizations, and it falls predominantly on women of color.

Measuring a construct as complex and dynamic as emotional labor lays the groundwork for important reform. By codifying, measuring, and describing the differential emotional burdens embedded in public organizations, I quantitatively demonstrate the need for equitable human resource management practices that address how organizations structurally reinforce inequity.

New Book Invisible Mothers, Unseen Yet Hypervisible After Incarceration

New Book, Invisible Mothers: Unseen Yet Hypervisible After Incarceration (UC Press)

Author Book Talk, Q&A With Janet Garcia-Hallett, Author of Invisible Mothers

Mothering is work. Yet, as I mention in my book, not all motherwork is equally visible, validated, or respected by the general public. This is especially true for mothers in the criminal legal system. Their experiences are unique because of the competing demands they face in oppressive carceral systems. Still, they did motherwork through varying housing arrangements, in noncustodial circumstances, while recovering from substance use, with low pay, during unemployment, and while not in contact with their children. All things considered, they did motherwork that was realistic for them and their circumstances post-incarceration – even if this went unnoticed or was undervalued by outsiders.