Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs Recent documents in Donald F. Tibbs en-us Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:02:05 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/5 http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/5 Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:32:30 PDT This article examines the case of the Jena 6 as a barometer of racial justice in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the Jena case is not a moment of excess, of white prejudice overriding the essential equity of the rule of law. Rather, Jena indicates a more mundane, destructive, and parasitic quality to the U.S. legal regime. Full interrogation of this case requires examining how the law itself has evolved through the state's mandate to capture the black body. The law is not merely a mechanism for maintaining a racial status quo. On the contrary, the law is itself constituted through racial configuration. The point to be examined here is socio-legal and historical in the sense that such an inquiry requires situating our particular spectacle--the Jena 6--at the locus of power created through the conjoined forces of the modern state, law, and race. We investigate three central ethics structuring this legal regime: parasitic pleasure, fraud, and white solidarity. We refer to these processes as "ethics" in order to underscore how the very legal fashioning of racial definition and articulation at work in the Jena case derive from a more fundamental existential problem--or as W.E.B. DuBois put it, "what it means to be a problem." The analytic we offer in this article, then, emerges from the slave codes of the antebellum era and from the de-criminalized violence of lynching and white sadism against black freed-persons. We aim to demonstrate how the Jena case is fundamental to understanding how white supremacy is so deeply engrained in U.S. law that it not only continues to inform the intrinsic political and psychic structures of this society, but its de facto legality brooks little alternative. Donald F. Tibbs Law and Society Race and Punishment http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/4 http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/4 Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:03:01 PST On Thursday, June 23, 1977, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, Inc., 433 U.S. 119 (1977), that prison inmates do not have a constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment to organize and join prisoner labor unions. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist took judicial notice that the inmate union in North Carolina was a glorified outlet for inmate anger designed to foment racial hatred in North Carolina's prison system. But, history suggest otherwise. The North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union (NCPLU), the first prisoner union in the South, not only condemned racial hatred, it actively sought the creation of a pluralist society behind prison walls. Its leadership contained no dangerous criminal element. Instead, educated black power activists, many of whom were imprisoned as an effort to stall their activism, operated it. Absent from the Jones opinion, and the academic discussions that followed, is any mention of the issues proposed in this study - the realities of the Black Power Movement behind prison walls. Black Power, Prison Power presents a historical analysis of law and race during the Black Power Movement, as well as their import in the Jones decision. It offers a clearer context for the domestic and international imperatives that characterized prisoners' rights politics during the Black Power era, and details how social factors, as opposed to the rule of law, galvanized the highest court in the United States to forever alter the course of prisoners' rights law. Donald F. Tibbs Legal History http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/2 http://works.bepress.com/donald_tibbs/2 Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:42:38 PDT Donald F. Tibbs