Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to examine the form and substance of post-racialism in legal education and lawyering within the fields of civil rights and poverty law. Building on the work of the eminent urban sociologist William Julius Wilson, the essay discusses the structure and culture of race and racial inequality in American law and society, and proffers an alternative structural and cultural discourse about race in legal-political advocacy. By discourse, I mean a way of seeing, speaking, and thinking about the world. Structural discourse speaks to the material effects of economic and social structures, such as low-skilled labor markets and housing segregation, on the physical environment of the inner-city. Cultural discourse speaks to the behavioral effects of these larger structures on individuals, families, and institutions, such as churches and nonprofit community organizations, within the inner-city. Both structural and cultural discourse focus on the interaction between individuals and their environments – cultural, economic, and social. In this way, the essay revisits the debate over color-conscious jurisprudence in scholarship, advocacy, and public policy. The essay is divided into four parts. Part I describes the Community Economic Development and Design Clinic’s Historic Black Church Project and the school-to-jail crisis in Miami. Part II reviews the structure and culture of difference, and outlines difference-based critical pedagogies and practices emerging in legal education and the lawyering process. Part III examines Wilson’s recent work on the structure and culture of the inner-city black poor, particularly the concentrated poverty affecting black men and black families. Part IV considers alternative post-racial pedagogies and practices to combat the structure and culture of contemporary inner-city black poverty exemplified by Miami’s school-to-jail crisis. The essay concludes that the crisis of inner-city concentrated poverty compels civil rights and poverty lawyers to reconfigure their understanding of structural and cultural effects when representing individuals, groups, and communities of color.