Fordham Law Professor Concurs “Black Racial Status” Is a “Legal Disability”
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Professor Kimani Paul-Emile, an associate professor of law at Fordham University and associate director of its law school’s Center on Race, Law & Justice, published a 72-page report titled “Blackness is a Disability”.
Professor Emile bottom line is being black in America is a ‘disability,’ she argues that while Africans Americans might initially spurn the “blackness as disability” label, it can actually be a wise courtroom plan.
From my own personal research, U.S. colonial slave legislation has already recognized this fact that she has shed new light on in the context of modern disability law which derives from civil rights legislation.
Prior to the end of the Inquisition in 1769, Jews, Moors, and Negroes were frequently referred to in official documents as racas infectadas (infected races).” Source: Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality
For example, S.C. Negro Law 1790 is titled: The Status of the Negro, his Rights, and Disabilities.
I think her suggestion of invoking disability law in conjunction with other civil rights private rights of action in any cause of action brought in the courts is nothing less than necessary. I interpret her method as fruitful in addressing the “white privilege” that judges provide to white defendants, white plaintiffs and white counsel in direct violation of the code of judicial conduct which in turn violates the constitutional right to procedural due process that opposes relief that Moors may seek in the courts throughout the United States.
Above and below are pages of legislation from the State of Georgia. The Legislation is title “Disabilities of Persons of Color” The South Carolina version is titled “Rights of the Negroes and his Disabilities”. These examples demonstrate Governments are well aware that legislation was used to impose disabilities on enslaved persons and their descendants. It’s my opinion that these enactments caused African Americans to suffer from personality disorders. Additionally, the provisions that address the color of persons enslaved should fall squarely within the concept of “Skin Disorders”.
The status of the Negro as property was officially erased by his emancipation at the end of the Civil War. But the long-awaited emancipation, while freeing the Negro from slavery, did not bring him citizenship or equality in any meaningful way. Slavery was replaced by a system of “laws which imposed upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value.” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 70 (1873).
Despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Negro was systematically denied the rights those Amendments were supposed to secure. The combined actions and inaction’s of the State and Federal Governments maintained Negroes in a position of legal inferiority for another century after the Civil War.
Source: Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)
The status of the Negro as property was officially erased by his emancipation at the end of the Civil War. But the long-awaited emancipation, while freeing the Negro from slavery, did not bring him citizenship or equality in any meaningful way. Slavery was replaced by a system of “laws which imposed upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value.” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 70 (1873).
Badges of slavery,” by contrast, had a somewhat looser meaning. See id. at 575–82. In the antebellum years, it could refer literally to a badge worn by slaves, such as copper badges issued to certain slaves in Charleston, South Carolina. See generally Harlan Greene et al., Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina 1783–1865 (2008); Rutherglen, Badges and Incidents, at 166 (noting that “badge,” in antebellum legal discourse, was sometimes used as shorthand for “evidence permitting an inference from external appearances to legal status”). In addition, “badges of slavery” could refer to the psychological scars that slavery inflicted upon slaves, McAward, Defining the Badges, at 577, or to any “evidence of political subjugation,” Rutherglen, Badges and Incidents, at 166
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