Event Date
Join us for a Racial Justice Speaker Series event featuring Jasmine E. Harris, Professor or Law, University of Pennsylvania. She will present a lecture entitled "Reckoning with Race and Disability: Guardianship and Racial Extraction".
Our national reckoning with racial injustice will be incomplete until we contend with the relationship between race and disability as legal categories in American law and policy. This discussion offers an opportunity to explore the intersection of race and disability through the history of one specific institution –guardianship. I argue that the racial extraction of labor, land, and sovereignty was made possible by the imposition of legal labels of disability and incapacity. While a robust literature details the history of extraction in the context of indigenous land and sovereignty and recognizes the fraught status of free Black Americans during the antebellum period, these stories live primarily in the histories of racial justice and do not attend to the operation of disability as the legal throughline. This discussion will reframe known historical moments through a disability lens and argue why guardianship sits at the heart of these stories with lessons for how we think about legal constructions of incapacity and personhood today.
Jasmine E. Harris is a law and inequality legal scholar with expertise in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. Her work seeks to address the relationship between law and equality with a focus on law’s capacity to advance social norms of inclusion in the context of disability.
This event is a part of a speaker series with more events throughout the year. More information on this event and future events in this series is available here.