Abstract
This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack’s Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America, and utilizes their insights to both explore the challenges that face the next generation of civil rights lawyers and offer suggestions on how this next generation of civil rights lawyers can overcome these difficulties. Overall, this Book Review highlights one similarity in the roles of black civil rights attorneys past and present: the need for lawyers in both generations to perform their identities in ways that make them racially representative of Blacks and racially palatable to Whites. Thereafter, this Book Review shows how the performance of black civil rights attorneys as the representatives of individuals, groups, and communities has become more complicated over time by highlighting the differences between the challenges encountered by early black civil rights lawyers and today’s and the next generation’s civil rights lawyers. Finally, this Book Review offers suggestions for strategies that the next generation of civil rights attorneys may use to rechannel the study and practice of civil rights law in more experimental, activist directions that attend to the complexities of how race is understood in today’s society as well as the complexities of how racial discrimination is practiced today. authors. Anthony V. Alfieri is Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Professor of Law, and Director, Center for Ethics and Public Service, University of Miami School of Law. He is grateful to Charlton Copeland, Ellen Grant, Amelia Grant-Alfieri, Adrian Grant-Alfieri, Patrick Gudridge, and the fellows and interns of the law school’s Historic Black Church Program for their support. He also wishes to thank Jose Becerra, Eliot Folsom, Jennifer Lefebvre, Eryca Schiffman, Stephanie Silk, and the University of Miami School of Law librarians for their research assistance. Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law, University of Iowa. She thanks Dean Gail Agrawal, Charles Kierscht, and Marion Kierscht for their research support. Finally, she gives special thanks to her husband, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, and their children, Elijah, Bethany, and Solomon, for their constant love and support. The authors thank Mario Barnes for his astute observations and comments. They also are very grateful to Song Richardson and Jeff Robinson for their many insights on civil rights practice. Finally, the authors thank their primary editor Doug Lieb for his thoughtful and insightful edits and comments. next-generation civil rights lawyers 1485 book review contents