Sunday, February 1, 2009

Gender, Race, Social Class, and Law

This article completely brought me back into one of my previous classes with Professor Baker from last semester. The class Drugs and Society, which is my favorite class of all time exmamined how the drug laws were completely gendered, racist and biased for the lawmakers. Learning about how the sentence for crack possession was so many times longer than coke possesion and that the drug war and related laws attacks foreign countries and their assets or harmless pot users sparked my interest.

Now this article explains to me how there are so many more factors and can be applied to more than just drug law. There are so many aspects of law today that make no sense or specifically help a single group more than others. It is just ridiculous.

This article shows evidence that the laws were structured to be racist and bias from the very beginning. Women were meant to be inferior, anyone who wasn't white wasn't equal and the first laws reflected that. There are still huge sections of law that are outdated and still prosecute these classes.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2009 at 8:04 AM

    "favorite class of all time" I completely agree.
    I also agree that laws are biased, and benefit fewer people than they help (generally, there are some exceptions. Someone mentioned in their blog about the Chinese government keeping books from the peasants to ensure that they never attempted to overthrow those in power. On a much less dramatic level the same thing happens in the United States. The government often makes insane and obscene laws and then keeps from informing the public. What the public doesn't know won't outrage them.

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  2. NatalieFebruary 5, 2009 at 9:20 PM

    I agree, however, not only are laws biased, the legal system is too. As Seron and Munger talked about in the article concerning the inequality in the legal system because of class. It seems that the court system is structured in a way that also shows an obvious bias in favor towards the upper class.

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  3. AnonymousFebruary 10, 2009 at 12:19 PM

    I think that a great question here is what can we possibly do about this situation? Understanding that many laws have racist, sexist, and/or classist foundations is important (obviously, I think so because I teach about these problems in many different classes). But is there any possible solution? And does that solution start with law? I think of Brown v. Board of Education (which we'll talk about later) which didn't really have an impact until (racist) parts of our culture started to change. It is even possible to argue (and you will see that Rosenberg does) that Brown didn't actually change anything at all.

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