And we are not saved

Note from SCritLS:

Professor Bell is required CRT reading. This book is polyvalent; it is part narrative, part fantasy, part critique, part futurist, and part jurist. But Bell does more than craft a brilliant piece of literature; he sets forth a trenchant critique of the failures of legal reform projects in achieving material equality and meaningful deliverance for Black people specifically and oppressed groups broadly.

In this book, the authors, all legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory start from the experience of injury from racist hate speech and develop a theory of the first amendment that recognizes such injuries. In their critique of "first amendment orthodoxy", the authors argue that only a history of racism can explain why defamation, invasion of privacy and fraud are exempt from free-speech guarantees but racist verbal assault is not.*