Saturday, April 08, 2006

It's The Freakin' Weekend

It's the weekend, and boy did I need one. From sending a rough draft of my article to a Boalt Hall Dean, to getting hired as a research assistant for the summer, it's been one great, if tiresome, week. For my research duties, my Philosophy overlord professor/supervisor basically assigned me stuff she knew I'd be interested in finding on my own. Specifically, she wants to look up the reactions of White southern newspapers to pre-Brown Supreme Court decisions. The specific foil is a claim made by another philosophy professor that essentially went "I grew up in the Jim Crow south: my dad was racist, my mom was racist, my minister was racist, there was nothing on my perceptual horizon that even suggested that racism could be wrong." She's skeptical, and wants me to see if the coverage was so one-sided as to buttress the claim. Really interesting stuff.

In addition to searching for newspaper archives, I'm thinking of starting with Michael J. Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, an article Eric Muller is working on regarding "Judging our Ancestors," and the work of Derrick Bell. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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