“The role of nonlegal actors in the legal construction of race can be understood as a question about whether people obey or acquiesce to the law.” (Haney Lopez) posted by Charles Johnson at How the Tejanos Became Non-White 30 Jan 2017 2:52 pm
Ian F. Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 146-147.Non-Whites
Judges and legislators continue to participate in the legal construction of race, if for some only through the internalization [147] of socially prevalent racist beliefs. But what of non-legal actors? The role of nonlegal actors in the legal construction of race can be understood as a question about whether people obey or acquiesce to the law. To obey suggests a rational, considered relation to law in which the law coerces through threats and rewards that are evaluated and form the basis for decisions about how to act. Acquiescence suggests a more complex relationship with law, one in which the actor accepts the norms and assumptions underlying law as legitimate or at least binding, leading to behavior conditioned, not just through a rational calculus of rsisk and rewards, but through subscription to the normative world of the legal regime.[67] This question of obedience or acquiescence among nonlegal actors is central to assessing the intractability of existing racial categories. If people merely obey the law, then altering laws might promise quick changes in racial construction; however, change might be more difficult if through a lifetime of acquiescence people have fully embraced the assumptions about races embedded in current laws. Questioning whether people obey or acquiesce to law takes on a significantly different character, however, when posed in a discussion about the role of people of color in the legal construction of race. In this context, the question becomes one of complicity: If rather than simply obeying the law we have acquiesced to it, are we complicitous in our own oppression?
- [67]KELMAN, supra, at 263.↩
