The Long Lingering Shadow

Résumé du livre

This is an Article on race relations and comparative legal history. It contrasts the law of race and slavery in three Latin American nations, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, with the parallel history in the United States. The Article examines the Afro-Latin experience as a critical issue in its own right and as a way to better inform our discussion of racial hierarchy, identity, and legal remedy in the United States. This Article examines the paradoxical role played by liberal legal and cultural norms in the United States. It shows how liberalism helped create a system of castelike separation between black and white in the United States. This castelike separation was far more rigid than found elsewhere in the hemisphere and was enforced by discriminatory laws. Yet the Article also argues that the very liberalism that helped create strong castelike boundaries in the United States has also helped produce a more thorough North American civil rights revolution than has, to date, occurred in Latin America.