What's Loving Got to Do with it?

14 Pages Posted: 22 Oct 2011

See all articles by Garrett Epps

Garrett Epps

University of Baltimore School of Law

Date Written: July 1996

Abstract

The context of this article is Jim Chen, Unloving, 80 Iowa L. Rev. 145 (1994) (responding to Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space, 81 Cal. L. Rev. 1243 (1993)

Imagine you are at a public meeting-a forum of some kind at which members of the community discuss their ideas and concerns. Seated ahead of you are two people you know only slightly. Imagine now that one of them (for the sake of that much-maligned value, narrative vividness, let us call him "Professor Chang") rises at a time when it is his tum to speak. Confessing to some hesitancy, some ambivalence and fear, he nonetheless confides in the group some thoughts he has been toying with-some concerns about the direction the community is taking, some tentative ideas for ways in which he and others might respond. Then imagine that Professor Chang sits down; but before most people in the crowd have even digested what he had to say, the person next to him (call him "Professor Chen") jumps from his chair, screams "You leave my wife out of this!" and begins to pummel Professor Chang, shouting insults as he does so.

I do not think it is excessive to characterize Professor Chen's attack on Professor Chang as a kind of academic mugging, intended to wound if not disable or destroy its object. Reading Professor Chen's intemperate language--his talk of Professor Chang's work as a "secessionist manifesto," the product of "racial fundamentalism," "a linguistic whip by which the lords of racial fundamentalism drive individuals into the appropriate racial herds" Nazi propaganda, "a virulent form of racism in its own right" a "racial creationism at its purest," and an apologia for "the most grotesque form of tyranny imaginable" --I was puzzled, angered, and concerned. I was even more puzzled to read that Professor Chen characterized this dialogue as "reasonable intellectual dispute" during which he generously chose to "treat [Chang's] Asian American moment with the dignity he so plainly want[ed]" (and, by implication, does not really deserve from an authority as eminent as Professor Chen). Two questions occur simultaneously. First, what could Professor Chang have done to inspire this unseemly outburst? And second, what makes Professor Chen believe he has the right thus to police scholarly discourse, branding those with whom he disagrees with the most hateful of stigmata?

Keywords: Loving v. Virginia, 87 S. Ct. 1817, racism, academic writing, free debate, smear journalism, academic freedom, free market, poltical correctness, Asian Americans, crtitical race theory

JEL Classification: J79, K39, L82

Suggested Citation

Epps, Garrett, What's Loving Got to Do with it? (July 1996). Iowa Law Review, Vol. 81, No. 5, pp. 1489-1501, July 1996, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1946987 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1946987

Garrett Epps (Contact Author)

University of Baltimore School of Law ( email )

1420 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
United States

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