Stereotypes Should Not Define 'Cultural Essence,' Lecturer Says

             Stanford Law School professor Richard Thompson Ford expressed concerns about the theory of racial culture, which assumes that cultural discrimination should be treated the same as racial discrimination, during a speech at Knight Law Center Tuesday night.

             "It proceeds to an oversimplified conjecture of culture," he said.

             The 2005-06 Colin Ruagh Thomas O'Fallon Lecturer in Law and American Culture discussed topics featured in his book, "Racial Culture: A Critique," such as his views on a 1981 court case filed by American Airlines employee Renee Rogers against her employer.

            Rogers alleged that the airline's grooming policy, which prohibited employees from wearing an "all-braided hairstyle," violated her rights under the 13th Amendment and under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it was race-discrimination against her as a black woman.

            The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against Rogers.

            Ford said he supports the court's ruling, not necessarily because of the legality of the claim, but because if Rogers had won, he said, it would have reinforced racial stereotypes.

            Had Rogers' claim established law, it would have encouraged black women to identify cornrows with their "cultural essence," Ford said. It would also "reduce the number of non-black women wearing the style and those women would also internalize the legally disseminated message that the hairstyle was the cultural property of another group," he said.

            Rogers had claimed that cornrows were an expression of her cultural pride. However, not all black women identify cornrows as part of their "cultural essence," defining a difference between culture and race, Ford said.

            He said he fears the negative side effects that could result if proponents of the theory of racial culture win popular support.

            "We'd provoke destructive racial stereotypes ... control and limit the ways that we can think about race, and worst of all, we'd control the way racial minorities, people of color, can think about their own identity ... and further distract attention away from more pressing issues of racial justice," he said.

            Ford said instead of creating laws that encourage an expansive cultural profile of a race, he believes employees should be given more autonomy in workplace grooming.

            Ford's ideas met with both support and criticism during the question-and-answer session following the lecture.

            "He was exploring some very complex ideas and coming down in the middle of them," assistant history professor Dayo Nicole Mitchell said. "He was just trying to transform the way we think about race, rather than dismiss it."

            Ford has been published in the Harvard Law Review and Stanford Law Review. He is a co-author of "The Legal Geographies Reader: Law, Power and Space," and he has written on topics ranging from federalist governments to the inadequacies of democratic campaigns.

            The Oregon Humanities Center sponsored the O'Fallon Lecture. Jim O'Fallon, the Frank Nash Professor of Law and the son of the event's namesake, selected Ford as the lecturer for the 19th annual event.

Link to the original article in the Oregon Daily Emerald: www.dailyemerald.com/2.2358/stereotypes-should-not-define-cultural-essence-lecturer-says-1.203632