Cedric Merlin Powell – författare

Over a century after racial zoning was invalidated, American land use remains racially unjust. When racist tools were abolished, other facially neutral tools were created or adapted to maintain white power and wealth. Policies, practices, and laws evolved to embed racial inequality and white supremacy deeply into institutional structures and landscapes. Despite modest improvements since the early twentieth century, land use and neighborhood conditions for Black people and other people of color remain dramatically worse than for whites. Discrimination and segregation persist. This enduring and multi-faceted nature of racial injustice in the American land use system means that there is no one cause and no one solution. Instead, this book advocates for nuanced systemic change. Using cross-disciplinary analysis in social-movement history, legal theory, and public policy, the authors call for a racial-justice transformation that integrates grassroots racial-justice activism, newly revitalized anti-subordination legal theories, and many different public policy reforms.

Post-Racial Constitutionalism and the Roberts Court: Rhetorical Neutrality and the Perpetuation of Inequality provides the first comprehensive Critical Race Theory critique of the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. Since being named to the Court in 2005, Chief Justice Roberts has maintained a position of neutrality in his opinions on race. By dissecting neutrality and how it functions as a unifying feature in all the Court's race jurisprudence, this book illustrates the consequences of this ostensible impartiality. By examining the Court's racial jurisprudence dating back to the Reconstruction, the book shows how the Court has actively rationalized systemic oppression through neutral rhetoric and the elevation of process-based decisional values, which are rooted in democratic myths of inclusivity and openness. Timely and trenchant, the book illustrates the permanence of racism and how neutrality must be rejected to achieve true empowerment and substantive equality.