The Rodrigo chronicles Conversations about America and race

Delgado has chosen a method known as legal storytelling and used by legal scholars such as Derrick A. Bell in Faces at the Bottom of the Well (CH, Feb'93) to communicate with readers. Although quite controversial, the growing use of legal storytelling is a refreshing and insightful approach that prevents readers from becoming overwhelmed by the traditional footnotes and citations so common in legal and other scholarly journals. Delgado does a masterful job, using two fictitious characters--professor and student--to explore such issues as racism and sexism in American society. More specifically, the author addresses these questions: can civil rights laws eradicate racism? Why, 40 years after Brown vs. The Board of Education, are black children more segregated than ever? Who really benefits from affirmative action? The book is an excellent exercise in intellectual gymnastics between the two characters. Their dialogue makes it quite difficult for the reader not to get caught up in this intellectual arena created by Delgado. All levels. E. A. McKinney; Cleveland State University

Borrowing the storytelling style-though with less emphasis on parable-of Derrick Bell's And We Are Not Saved, Delgado, who teaches law at the University of Colorado, offers challenging thoughts on race and law. In nine ``chronicles'' originally published in various law reviews, Delgado posits Rodrigo, an audacious black graduate law student, in dialogue with an older professor of color scarred by ``years in the trenches'' of civil rights scholarship. Rodrigo observes how informal law-school hiring criteria-personal ties to professors-function as a ``sort of affirmative action for whites'' and, by sketching racism as a ``cultural paradigm,'' demolishes law-and-economics scholars who call discrimination a matter of individual preferences. Some memorable-and debatable-passages invert conventional wisdom: Rodrigo proposes that the middle class have sinned more than the ghetto poor because they ignore inner-city anguish; he suggests that the racial imagery of ``enlightenment-style Western democracy'' is the source of black subordination; and he argues provocatively that crime committed by whites, which includes most ``white-collar crime,'' is far more harmful to society than crime committed by blacks, so many of whom are poor. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved