In 1997, Chief Justice John Roberts provocatively stated in the school discrimination case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Letters of the Law presents a multilayered case against this notion of colorblindness in American jurisprudence. Author Sora Han argues that colorblindness is a cultural fantasy, and one that interprets racism as a problem of individual or collective behaviorwhen in fact it is structural and an enduring presence within the law that cannot and should not be ignored.
Letters of the Law exposes how colorblindness is an essential psychical structure of modern legal subject-formation, and explores the ensuing dilemma of the representability of race. By analyzing and providing close readings of various Supreme Court cases in which racial justice is at issue before the lawfrom Japanese internment to affirmative action, from slave codes to prisoner rights, from Jim Crow segregation to criminal procedurethis book argues that colorblindness is an essential feature of how the law reproduces itself textually, how people come to understand themselves as legal subjects, and how the imagined community instituted by the rule of law sustains its multiracial identity as a nation. In other words: the law asks us to be colorblind, and the nation falls short or resists. Han argues that this foundational and symbolic back and forth is the cultural practice that defines the American rule of law, which is ultimately problematic in that race is never fully represented in the law.
