Columbia University premiered a new scholarly periodical in February that examines racial and ethnic injustice in an effort to promote “a more perfect union.”
The Columbia Journal of Race and Law will publish comprehensive articles written by scholars, lawmakers, experts and students that dissect issues such as affirmative action, immigration, environmental justice and voting rights.
Its editor-in-chief, third-year law student and former NAACP Legal Defense Fund intern Sheila Adams, said in a release that high profile incidents including Arizona’s immigration law and the disproportionate impact of the financial and foreclosure calamities on minorities disprove theories that President Obama’s election ushered in a “post-racial” society.
“In short, the relevance of race in our society and, thus, the law, continues to be very much a reality, and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural nature of our communities both complicates and enriches this sphere of academic inquiry,” Adams wrote in the first issue’s “Editor’s Note.”
The inaugural issue features essays and articles that address the “indeterminacy” of standing laws to protect racial and class privilege, the correlation between segregation and high foreclosure rates, and the question of whether America has achieved the goals of protestors who took on the Selma, Alabama Bridge for equal voting rights.
Kendall Thomas, law professor and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, penned the forward.
“Race and racism today are not what they were in 1960,” he wrote. “Nonetheless, the spectral fear of a Black public—or of a Black president—has not been completely exorcised from the U.S. body politic.”