The academy has alienated itself from the study of racial capitalism, closing off vistas, mystifying our present, and making our most challenging problems all the more intractable. First, in law, we are largely bound by the precepts of law and economics and work from an unstated set of assumptions about efficient allocation, the rational pursuit of self-interest, the free agency of parties to private contracts, and the use of incentives to produce behavioral outcomes. Law and economics has been a battering ram used to disaggregate and diminish normative notions of justice and the common good. Current modes of capitalist production and distribution are taken for granted in legal academic discourse and law school curricula. Second, anti-Blackness and racial subordination are baked into our analysis. Anti-Blackness is the ideology that animates the capitalist exploitation of low-wage workers and the acquisition of land and resources around the world. And yet in the legal academy, the textbooks and the pedagogy avoid the centrality of both race and capitalism.
Law is in dire need of an epistemological disruption. Racial capitalism compels legal academics to make visible the “code of capitalism” – in Katherine Pistor’s words – in their field of study and to account for the denigration of Black and indigenous people in systems of law. Clinical practice can be an important site for such an intervention, as it often is the first place where future lawyers are exposed to the contradictions of legal precepts and the externalities of a legal system that props up racial capitalism. In this proposed discussion, we will ask these questions:
1. How do we understand the relationship between law and racial capitalism?
2. How can clinicians select cases and projects so as to bring conditions of racial capitalism to the surface?
3. How do we contextualize and explain those intake choices to our students?
4. How do we seed our syllabi and seminar discussions with insights from writers in the Black Radical Tradition, such as WEB Du Bois, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Patricia Hill Collins, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Saidiya Hartman?
5. How do we contextualize social critique in clinical offerings in which students expect practical skills education?