Robert Chang JD/MA ’92 delivers inaugural Jerome M. Culp, Jr. Critical Theory Lecture
Chang urged students to read history to appreciate the struggles of others and change America's divisive historical narrative.
Robert Chang JD/MA '92 and Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law Trina Jones
Robert Chang JD/MA '92 returned to Duke Law School to deliver the inaugural Jerome M. Culp, Jr. Critical Theory Lecture on Feb. 1 before students, faculty, and members of Culp’s family.
Chang, a professor of law and executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law, was a friend and colleague of Culp, a member of the Duke Law faculty from 1985 until his death on Feb. 5, 2004, and the school’s first tenured professor of color. A prolific scholar, Culp was internationally known for his work on race and the law and was the author of numerous books and articles on critical race theory, justice and equality, law and economics, and labor economics.
Chang co-authored several papers with Culp and has followed in his steps, writing primarily in the area of race and interethnic relations as the author of Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State (NYU Press, 1999), co-editor of Minority Relations: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), and author of more than 60 articles, essays, and chapters on critical race theory, LatCrit theory, and Asian American legal studies.
He was introduced by Trina Jones, the Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Center on Law, Race & Policy, which sponsored the event.
Chang titled his lecture, “How Do We Come to Participate in the Struggles of Those Who Are Not Us?,” after words he first heard from Culp. Born in Korea and raised in a small midwestern town, Chang said he endured name-calling and racial slurs by staying silent and focusing on academic achievement.
“Although I would never claim to know what it is to be Black in America, I do know what it is like to be an ‘other,’ Chang recalled. “I wasn’t equipped to deal with racism so I put that experience and those feelings in a box and I just put them away in the closet.’”
It wasn’t until law school that he began to find a language and lens to understand racism through exposure to Culp and other scholars at events like the annual Duke Law Journal Frontiers of Legal Thought symposium.
“He wrote that who we are matters as much as what we are and what we think,” Chang said. “He gave me the courage to speak.”
Tracing the origins of today’s racial fissures, Chang spoke of how Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 brought together thousands of Virginians, including indentured Europeans and indentured, enslaved, and free Black people, in an uprising against the colonial governor that resulted in the burning of Jamestown. To ensure that people in the lower classes would not join together again, the power structure codified discriminatory laws against Black people, and institutional leaders issued constant reminders of the different treatment of racial groups.
Chinese exclusion laws, the granting of Philippine independence, discriminatory naturalization and citizenship policies, racial positioning by Irish immigrants pursuing a "whiteness strategy,” alien land laws, Muslim travel bans, racial triangulation by Asian Americans, and the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are examples of how systematized differentiating and “othering” of racial and ethnic groups has been employed to perpetuate white supremacy, Chang said.
"Despite the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments, and then followed by redemption after the Union troops are pulled out of the South, what we see is a periodic renewal of this racial contract, of this racial compact.
“We're seeing that right now. We're seeing that in the context of cases like [Students for Fair Admisssions] v. Harvard and [University of] North Carolina. And I think that we are seeing an intensification of white racial identity. And we're not winning that narrative war.”
But that could change, he said, if people follow Culp’s example.
“In terms of thinking about the long game, the narrative battle, how do we come to participate in the struggles of those who are not us? How do we come to see ourselves in others? How do we come to see others in ourselves?” Chang asked.
“Learn your history. Learn the histories of those who are not you. That was Jerome. ... He showed up for others. And so I am so honored to have been asked to deliver the inaugural Culp Critical Theory Lecture.”
The lecture can be viewed in its entirety here.