Renee Nicole Allen’s From Academic Freedom to Cancel Culture: Silencing Black Women in the Legal Academy is an important law review article. From Academic Freedom performs three valuable functions.
First, Allen outlines how legal institutions seek “to cancel” black women law professors by failing to legitimize them as public figures within the law school. Allen identifies what she terms “tools of cancellation” including dysfunctional benevolence and intentional microaggressions, as well as the responses of self-silencing and sidelining that black women law professors employ to navigate these tools of cancellation. Allen consolidates existing scholarship on these subjects. What makes From Academic Freedom powerful is the ways she employs these novel frames together to describe how these actions work together to silence black women law professors.
As Allen describes this process of cancellation, she then introduces her second innovation, her claim that law school functions as a white space that enforces white norms. Here, I want to place Allen’s work squarely within the burgeoning field of property, race and the law. Recent property theory has engaged a broad, multi-disciplinary theory in legal geography, sociology, history, psychology, with space, which can broadly be described as an abstract way to describe the physical dimension or characteristics of a location, and place, by contrast, consists of those spaces imbued with social meaning built through site-specific engagement and memory.
Allen’s work utilizes this scholarly tradition to examine the law school as a space. Adopting the scholarly work of sociologist Elijah Anderson, collected recently in Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (2021), Allen identifies how law schools operate as white spaces, that is spaces characterized by the “overwhelming presence of white people” and the “exclusion of black people” where “white norms” are pervasive. (Pp. 366, 371.) A law school is a white space, Allen notes for both historical and ideological reasons because it enforces white norms in who is expected to be a law professor. White norms, according to Allen, can include norms as to appearance, teaching methods, and appropriate scholarship. For instance, a promotion and tenure review that emphasizes that the use of critical race theory method is too tied closely to “identity politics” may negatively impact black women scholars.
Finally, Allen consolidates an extensive scholarly literature on the institutional experience of Black women scholars, thus extending the lineage of critical race theory. An important part of Allen’s scholarly innovation in From Academic Freedom, is that it asks us—black women scholars—to openly discuss our experiences in the academy.
Naming the costs of our newness is such vital work. I, always, note that Patricia Williams (yes, that Patricia Williams) convinced me to go law school. I often tell this story to stress we, as black women, were so new to the law school experience, that as late as 1994, it took one of the great pioneers of legal scholarship to convince me to go to law school. Even more new is that now some of us (not enough of us), are professors and increasingly, deans. I have become concerned, though in light of the recent deaths of Prof. Lani Guinier and Dean Browne C. Lewis, that this newness, imposes substantial costs on black women professors in legal academia.
I have been so inspired by our younger black women scholars, whom have spoken of our pain, and taken on tasks, where for many personal and institutional reasons, many of us have had to remain cautious in our own work.
While, though, I admire this paper for its necessary courage, I want to be careful to notice its scholarly innovations, particularly its work in consolidating and categorizing pre-existing scholarship. I expect to not only to inform future scholarship but prompt vital conversations at law schools about improving the experience of black women law professors and students.
