Letters of the Law – Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law: The Cultural Lives of Law

Drawing on concepts from critical race theory, feminist psychoanalysis and deconstruction, the Introduction exposits and explains the importance of developing a protocol of reading the law's language of race anew. "Letters of the Law" is the conceptual term designating this protocol of reading beyond the law's functional effects in or formal divisions from social reality, and toward the law's language of race on its own terms. The fantasy of colorblindness serves as the entry point into the law's language, and is further exposited through case law and critical scholarship on race and law. In the course of this exposition, the Introduction also revises the central theoretical assumptions dominating the study of race and law so that they can better reflect the centrality of fantasy, unconscious desire, and rhetoric and writing to the practice and politics of legal reform and black freedom struggle.