The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will present a lecture by Khiara M. Bridges, professor of law, UC Berkeley School of Law, on Jan. 19 at 4 p.m. in Henley Hall Lecture Hall at UCSB. The title of the lecture is “Race in the Roberts Court: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.” It is part of the Capps Forum on Ethics and Public Policy series. This event is free and open to the public.

In this lecture, Bridges argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s impoverished conceptualization of what “counts” as racism against people of color is a strategy that the Court deploys to accomplish regressive ends. This constrained understanding of racism permits the Court to do nothing to destabilize and disestablish the country’s existing racial hierarchy. When confronted with a claim of racial discrimination, the Court appears to be simply determining whether the alleged discrimination resembles what the country did in the pre-Civil Rights Era. If the Court sees a resemblance between the present-day harm and the racism of yesteryear, the Court provides relief. If it sees no resemblance, it provides no relief. This lecture will use the Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, reversing Roe v. Wade, to make the argument.

Khiara M. Bridges is professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of race, class, and reproductive rights. She is the author of three books and numerous articles, including Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). Bridges has been quoted by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, Politico, Wired, and NPR. She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Black Studies, Department of Feminist Studies, UCSB Feminist Futures Initiative, UCSB Health Humanities Initiative, UCSB Legal Humanities Initiative, and Santa Barbara Women’s Health Coalition.
For more information about this lecture, visit https://www.cappscenter.ucsb.edu/news/event/465