Richard Delgado

Interview with Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The Iowa law school journal, Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, interviewed Richard and Jean — and the interview is published here.

Here is a provocative comment:

Jean and I have written about the difficulties of “crossover” writing, in the pages of American Indian Law Review. We think it is a mistake for a minority scholar to write too much of his or her work with a white audience in mind. If you do, you end up pulling your punches and choosing words and topics that will resonate with your audience. Even the very vocabulary in which you write–terms like “villager,” “folk medicine,” “undocumented alien,” “tribe,” “hut,” and “merit”–carry meanings that render your people one-down. Sometimes it feels better to write in your native language or vernacular and for an audience consisting of people like you.

Richard Delgado on the Origins of Critical Race Theory

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Richard Delgado has posted his paper, “Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory,” on SSRN. It is forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

I wrote this piece exploring some of the intellectual origins of critical race theory for a 20-year anniversary of the movement held at the University of Iowa in April, 2009. In it, I look at the role of certain prominent university officers in purging their ranks of white radicals to prepare the way, in the late sixties and early seventies, for the first large group of post-Brown minority students who were starting to arrive around that time. I show how four promising white professors, two of law, one of history, and one of criminology lost their jobs and what they did afterward. I show that they continued to teach and write about left-wing thought in the hinterlands in ways that contributed to the rise of critical race theory. As they say, it is hard to kill an idea.

American Indian Law & Lit Speakers Profile — Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

We are pleased to welcome Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic to East Lansing this weekend. They will be presenting a talk entitled, “Crossover.”

They are both very prolific writers and have been pioneers in the development of Critical Race Theory. And Richard has published several articles related to Indian law and policy, see, e.g., here and here. Jean and Richard co-authored a recent book of law and literature, “How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Loses Its Creative Minds” (Duke, 2005).