The Rodrigo Chronicles
Conversations About America and Race
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Richard Delgado is one of the most evocative and forceful voices writing on the subject of race and law in America today. The New York Times has described him as a pioneer of critical race theory, the bold and provocative movement that, according to the Times "will be influencing the practice of law for years to come. "
In The Rodrigo Chronicles, Delgado, adopting his trademark storytelling approach, casts aside the dense, dry language so commonly associated with legal writing and offers up a series of incisive and compelling conversations about race in America. Rodrigo, a brash and brilliant African-American law graduate has been living in Italy and has just arrived in the office of a professor when we meet him. Through the course of the book, the professor and he discuss the American racial scene, touching on such issues as the role of minorities in an age of global markets and competition, the black left, the rise of the black right, black crime, feminism, law reform, and the economics of racial discrimination.
Expanding on one of the central themes of the critical race movement, namely that the law has an overwhelmingly white voice, Delgado here presents a radical and stunning thesis: it is not black, but white, crime that poses the most significant problem in modern American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Borrowing the storytelling style-though with less emphasis on parable-of Derrick Bell's And We Are Not Saved, Delgado, who teaches law at the University of Colorado, offers challenging thoughts on race and law. In nine ``chronicles'' originally published in various law reviews, Delgado posits Rodrigo, an audacious black graduate law student, in dialogue with an older professor of color scarred by ``years in the trenches'' of civil rights scholarship. Rodrigo observes how informal law-school hiring criteria-personal ties to professors-function as a ``sort of affirmative action for whites'' and, by sketching racism as a ``cultural paradigm,'' demolishes law-and-economics scholars who call discrimination a matter of individual preferences. Some memorable-and debatable-passages invert conventional wisdom: Rodrigo proposes that the middle class have sinned more than the ghetto poor because they ignore inner-city anguish; he suggests that the racial imagery of ``enlightenment-style Western democracy'' is the source of black subordination; and he argues provocatively that crime committed by whites, which includes most ``white-collar crime,'' is far more harmful to society than crime committed by blacks, so many of whom are poor.
