Reading judicial opinions as cultural productions exposes races’ contested origins

Evidence

What I am suggesting is a way of reading, a reading practice if you will, that attends to the way judicial opinions function as cultural productions that create and recreate race. This method is not only one of interpretation. It requires a prior critical intervention of deconstruction. Moreover, all texts are open to such critical readings: judicial opinions that may have more direct effects on law, briefs, testimony, and evidence that becomes textual. The methods of deconstruction and “reading back” reveal sites of contestation more clearly. They also show how certain ideas that were once contested become assumptions and taken-for-granted background facts that then go unchallenged. Once this happens, these ideas become normalized and commonsensical. These deconstructive methods show the sites and ideas that should be contested but may not be by revealing unarticulated notions that operate like phantoms haunting the text in the background. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘reading back as cultural production’ method echoes the racecraft thesis that race is made through practice (chapter 52); Capers offers the interpretive technique for surfacing the practice the law normally hides. — connects to: Court legitimation converts false anti-Muslim claims into citable authority; Reading black is a skill detached from the reader’s own race — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 365; Racial historicism and the rule of law co-evolved as instruments of dominance — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 78 (+9 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes a core definitional move in this chapter: reading back as a critical-deconstructive practice revealing how contested ideas become commonsensical background.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Reading law oppositionally reveals how contested ideas harden into normalized racial commonsense #corroborates (0.92) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364
• Racial historicism and the rule of law co-evolved as instruments of dominance #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 78
• Bodily and cultural notions of race developed together from the start #corroborates (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 125
• Racialized legal categories are contradictory yet persist as common sense #corroborates (0.80) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 141
• Inconsistencies in colonial records reveal rather than undermine racial epistemology #corroborates (0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 234
• Racism creates races through practice, and the practice hides itself as its own evidence #expands (0.78) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 322
• Historicist racial argumentation is harder to dismiss than biologized racism #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28
• Racial assessments persisted as scholarly truth-claims despite formal legal abolition of race criteria #corroborates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1011
• Embedded race thinking makes suspension of rights look like law #expands (0.75)