Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, And the Legal History of Racism in America

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U of Minnesota Press, 2005 M11 10 - 270 páginas
Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned “like a loaded weapon” in the Supreme Court’s Indian law decisions. 

Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. 

Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in international law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians. 

Robert A. Williams Jr. is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. A member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, he is author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest and coauthor of Federal Indian Law.

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Contenido

Part I Discovering a Language of Racism in America
1
The NineteenthCentury Supreme Court and Indian Rights
31
Part III The TwentiethCentury PostBrown Supreme Court and Indian Rights
85
Part IV The Rehnquist Courts Perpetuation of Racism against Indians
135
The Fifth Element
161
Notes
197
Index
265
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Página 18 - ... so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro may justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
Página 18 - He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.
Página 60 - They may more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage: their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.
Página 259 - Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. 2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Página 208 - Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system.
Página 81 - The power of the general government over these remnants of a race once powerful, now weak and diminished in numbers, is necessary to their protection, as well as to the safety of those among whom they dwell.
Página 17 - It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted.
Página 120 - There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Página 216 - But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Página vi - But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself.

Acerca del autor (2005)

Robert A. Williams, Jr., is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona

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