Historically, ideology has been co-opted to justify and mask racism and oppression in

America this will only continue

Charles R. Lawrence 83 (Review: Justice or Just Us: Racism and the Role of Ideology, Stanford
Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Apr., 1983), pp. 831-856) Charles Lawrence is a professor of Law at
Georgetown University, and has taught at UCLA, USC, Berkeley, and Harvard since 1974 with an
expertise in antidiscrimation law and Critical Race Theory

The legal system-along with academia and the church has been a principal vehicle for the development
and transmission of ideological thought. The history of the ideology of American race relations illustrates
the central role which these institutions have played in creating and disseminating images that justify
this country's treatment of blacks while at the same time concealing and distorting its reality. Slavery was
justified through a Christian ideology that saw Africans as nonhumans, heathens, or the descendants of
Ham. Enslavement was explained both as just punishment (i.e., "the sins of the father shall be visited)
and as the means of salvation for an infidel race that did not know God. The rejection of a slave-based
economy and the resultant civil war and emancipation required a new ideology. Reconstruction conceded
personhood to blacks and granted them nominal' constitutional protections, but whites still treated them as
social untouchables and denied them access to white-only schools, jobs, and housing. Now academia
supplied the ideology of oppression-Social Darwinism-which stated that Nature's will dictated that the
superior prevail over the inferior. Segregation was justified because social intermingling would endanger
the existence of the white race and the Anglo-Saxon civilization. Today, racial injustice finds its
justification not in the commands of God or Nature but in the law.49 Although the equal protection clause
gives us a legal command to treat all persons equally, the Court has created a set of ideological images
that condition our societal conception of equality. For example, the law tells us that (1) even when blacks
are obviously being treated differently because of their race they are not really being wrongfully
discriminated against or denied equal opportunity so long as the discrimination is not intentional;50 (2)
even when there is evidence of intentional race-based discrimination, no one has been constitutionally
injured unless the discriminators used the government as their instrument of discrimination;51 and (3) all
individuals must be viewed as similarly situated, i.e., they all begin the competition at the same starting
line, and therefore must be treated the same. Thus, without proof of specific, government-sponsored,
racially motivated discrimination, any injury that might bring blacks to the competition with an obvious
disadvantage does not legally exist and may not be taken into account.52 These principles create an
illusion of equal treatment which takes the place of reality. The law requires that we treat blacks and
whites equally. We are a law-abiding country, and the courts tell us that in the vast majority of instances
the law is obeyed. Thus, if we are treating blacks and whites equally, and blacks continue to be
disproportionately represented at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, it must either be because they
are failing to avail themselves of the opportunities available to them or because they are not capable of
availing themselves of those opportunities. This ideological illusion replaces the reality of continued
racial exclusion. The ideology of equal opportunity tells us that the barriers of segregation and
discrimination have been removed: If blacks continue to fail it must be because they are inferior.53 The
idea that modern equal protection law is part of an ideology that serves the needs of a particular groupelite whites-has been an important theme in the writing of Allan Freeman. In a truly perceptive analysis of
legal scholarship in the area of equal protection doctrine, Freeman found that the prevailing approach has
involved "quests for new formalisms, toward shared values that can be hauled out as objective references
against which to test and evaluate the outcomes of seeming conflicts."54 He contrasts this focus on the
possibility of consensus with his own view that legal doctrine emerges from a "continuing dialectic of

struggle, characterized by value clashes that share no . . . agreed-upon reference point."55 He wonders
aloud why within legal scholarship he finds himself a relatively lonely voice in asking questions like
"What shared values are asserted?" "Whose values are they?" "In whose interests do they exist as values?"
and "What do they presuppose?"56