The Baldy Center Podcast

The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo|
Fall 2023, Episode #35
Podcast recording date: 10/27/2023
Host-producer: Logan
Speaker: Athena D. Mutua
Contact information: BaldyCenter@buffalo.edu

Transcription begins

Logan:

Hello and welcome to The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast. I'm your host, Logan. Today we are joined by Professor of Law, Athena Mutua, Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar. Professor Mutua talks about her academic journey, how her career trajectory changed throughout her life. We spoke about how and why the CLC was formed, its goals, what the conference will entail, and how all students at UB can get involved with the Critical (Legal) Collective. Here is Professor Athena Mutua. 

Alright, well thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.

Athena:

My pleasure.

Logan:

I wanted to start off with having you introduce yourself to our audience and walk us through how you got to where you are right now.

Athena:

Okay. My name is Athena Mutua, and I'm a law professor here at UB and I have another title or something. I have been at UB since probably about 1997 and went on tenure track around 2000, something like that. And my area is I write from a particular perspective, Critical Race Theory in part, from a class crit perspective or a law and political economy perspective. And I write on a host of different issues generally in the civil rights area. I teach business associations and a number of constitutional law courses that generally focus on the 14th Amendment. And I have taught, of course, a series of other courses like administrative law, banking law, transitional justice, those sorts of things. How do I get here? I started school, my bachelor’s degree is actually in international law, international not law, international relations, and studied in both Germany and Columbia was kind of my thing. 

Logan:

That's interesting. 

Athena:

It was fun.

Logan:

Columbia?

Athena:

I was 20. In Bogota. And in Germany I studied in one of those six-month programs, so I went to Earlham College, which is a small Quaker college, and they really did emphasize overseas study. And so I spent probably six months or so in Germany and Austria and then came back and did Columbia and did this international relations degree. And so that's kind of how I started. And I take off a year, do some traveling mostly at that point in Africa, I had an uncle who had been in the civil rights movement who was in Tanzania. And so I hung out with him for a year and came back to law school. Went through law school, was still kind of focused on international law, international human rights, that sort of thing. And then followed up far too quickly I think with an LLM degree. And there I kind of was on this international law path and ran into, didn't quite run into, but then had this concern about race, racism, ethnic oppression, those kinds of things, gender oppression.

I come of age 12, 13 with the song “I Am Woman.” So all of those things are kind of in the back of my mind. And I ended up taking a course with Derrick Bell. The course was about, we were reviewing his book, and I can't remember if it was the first one, And We Are Not Saved was the title of it, or the second one Faces at the Bottom of the Well. But anyway, that was kind of one of the focuses of the class. And I thought, okay, these are things around how society is organized and how certain groups' lives are limited that I need to deal with. I'm going to take this moment, I was thinking, and kind of start dealing with this, assuming that it was something that I could kind of figure out, right? I'm very young, figure out, resolving my mind and move on. That's kind of how I approached it, and I've been on it ever since. 

Went out, practiced a couple of years, did practice banking law as a matter of fact, and then went back and ran the Harvard's graduate law program, the LLM program there, LLM- SJD program, for a number of years. So did administration and did kind of all forms of administration within the context of this graduate law program. So I did, I was a Deputy Administrator and then I was Director of Admissions. So lots of pieces, lots of different administrative pieces. And then decided that had enough of that, my spouse who is an international lawyer and an academic here at UB, we started searching for other things. He ended up here at UB, wrote some letters. He ended up here, I followed. And then over time just decided, oh yeah, I too I'm going to go into the teaching market. And met a terrific friend, Stephanie Phillips who was here on the faculty. And she said to me, well, Athena, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to do Critical Race Theory. And I didn't realize at the time that Stephanie Phillips, of course, was one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. And so she just smiled to me and smiled at me and said, okay, that's doable. And then started taking me by the hand, mostly to different conferences. And so that's how I kind of get on this trajectory and pretty much stay with a lot of my writing from this perspective and on different kinds of issues., Affirmative Action or now I just finished something on abortion and that sort of thing. That's kind of been my trajectory looking at judges, looking at how diverse the judiciary is, and looking at penalties. So I have a series of writings on different things, but often from this perspective. So that's a very long answer, but one, I think that makes sense, that's fairly coherent to the extent that anybody's life is coherent.

Logan:

Well, it seems like you got to try a little bit of everything before landing here at UB, which is really interesting. And now you're a part of a team or a group called the Critical (Legal) Collective. And could you explain to our listeners how this group came to be and what you do? I know it's made up of a variety of scholars from institutes like Boston University, University of New Mexico. So how did you guys find each other? How did that come about?

Athena

Yes, the Critical (Legal) Collective. Well, how did that come about? So in the moment we were reacting to the attack on the Critical Race Theory, and I think a number of us had kind of ignored it and thought, this is kind of silly. That's not what Critical Race Theory is. So we just kind of ignored it. And then we looked up kind of a year later and there were 3-, 4-, 500 laws and resolutions kind of banning the stuff. So we were a little startled, but the African American Policy Forum had kind of seen this thing from the beginning and had really taken the lead. And they then made a kind of call out for more assistance to respond to this attack. And our response was, yay. But we don't want to just respond. We want to promote. We want to double down. We've got something to say that's valuable, that's closer to the truth than what these people are talking about. And we want to advance critical thinking and critical thought. 

And of course, that had been our history. So the background to that moment is there were a series of Critical Race Theory conferences back in the eighties and nineties, and I've written about this and a piece on Critical Race Theory. And just as the founders were spreading out and doing other things, another set of critical theorists arose and created a formation called LatCrit, which is Latino/Latina Critical Legal Scholarship. I say LatCrit so often, I no longer remember what it stands for. The Critical Race Theory in its initial phases focused very much on the African American experience. And that provided certain kinds of knowledge, certain kinds of critical knowledge from the bottom, from this marginalized group. LatCrit brought another perspective and some other issues. So they were looking clearly at immigration and other issues that had not really surfaced when you focused on this African American experience as we defined it at the time.

And so the theory, Critical Race Theory started growing. Then there was Asian American scholarship, there's of course all of this Indigenous scholarship and that sort of stuff. So it started to grow. But anyway, this group formed something called LatCrit. And LatCrit became a place where they talked about rotating centers, and I talked about shifting bottoms. Who's on the bottom on a particular issue, really shifts, but rotating centers. And so the idea was that Latina identity is pan-ethnic and pan-racial. And all of those issues were explored in that space. It was very open. A lot of us who grew up with kind of Critical Race Theory and critical thought ended up in that space. And then there were others. And so, I and Martha McCluskey, of course, who is a faculty member here at UB as well, we came together and started another formation that focused on economic inequality, but also wanted to look at issues around racial injustice, gender injustice and that sort of stuff. And so we started something called ClassCrits, and we were out there for a long time, 6, 7, 8, 10 years before you started to see this mushrooming of what is now called Law and Political Economy. That's a huge ecosystem now of which we are a part, but we started that analysis years before the recession. 

So when you get to the Critical (Legal) Collective, I'm drawing all of these huge circles for you. What you see coming together are all these formations, LatCrit people, ClassCrit people, LPE people, folks from the think tank, the African American Policy foundation. And then once we start talking, then we go back to reach back to, a lot of our teachers who are Critical Legal Studies folks. When you think about Critical Legal Studies, we start calling Kendall Thomas, we start calling Duncan Kennedy. And when we call, as we are kind of in this moment where there's this distortion of what we are doing and what we have done, every group of people we call, every person we call, and every group of people we call, they say Yes.

We were thinking, what can we do? What can we do? How might we help? Because we need to at least correct the record. That was some of the thinking. But others were critical thinking and joining in on critical thought is really important. And a lot of these formations and movements really ground knowledge and theories in the perspectives of people who have been oppressed in this kind of space, in the space of marginalized people. And so as we went around to these different formations and to these different people who kind of gauge and critique law. We're almost all legal academics, there were activists among our group, which was a great thing. We decided that we would participate in the African American Policy Forum activities, but that we needed a bigger group. And at that point we were thinking, and we want to double down on the contributions we think we've made in a variety in almost every area you can imagine.

And so as we had done before, set up a group called the Critical (Legal) Collective. And the ideal was not to supplant other groups but have this be a collective. Bringing the expertise in and bringing the energy in from some other places and spaces, even though those spaces continue. So ClassCrits did focus on law and economic inequality and how that plays out. And so that's a vibrant space. The Critical (Legal) Collective is a collective of that. And so the thought is to bring folks together around, not only engaging in and to try to combat what started off as some sort of anti-CRT movement, but to also promote critical thinking and critical thought in law, to promote it. And so that's the group. So you've got all these people from all of these different groups that are part of it. So we've been at it since August 2021, and we're having our inaugural conference in November from November 10th through the 12th at Duke Law School and their Center for Racial Justice, that's not the correct name, host CLC. So our first conference is coming up.

Logan:

And that is titled, “Organizing for Democracy and Liberation: the Right to Learn, the Right to Teach, the Right to Thrive.” And in the synopsis of the conference, it discusses how it was formed out of the reaction, like you said, to police brutality, resistance to white supremacy with the catalyst being the murder of George Floyd in 2020. So could you talk about the importance of having conferences and gatherings like this and what can come out of them or how they help us move in the right direction?

Athena:

Yes. So the conference has developed over time because you have a George Floyd, and you have these huge protests. And one thing that's clear about George Floyd of course, is it is a multiracial, multiethnic, what we say call a multivalent protest, all kinds of people all over the country and in fact the world. Very interesting moment. And these folks really start calling for a racial reckoning. So that's going on. You also have The 1619 Project, which caused quite a stir. How dare you center slavery in the American experience was the reaction. So you have that. I have argued, and other people would argue differently, I have argued that the anti-woke, anti-CRT, all of that, that campaign rose to try to stifle, to distract from this kind of multi democratic call for a reckoning, a push for this kind of multiracial, multiethinic, multivalent democracy that already exists. And that makes up the majority of the US electorate and country. That it already exists. It doesn't come together very well sometimes. People talk about it as a coalition, but my sense is that it exists, and you saw it in that moment. And so you actually hear politicians saying how they have to counteract this. They want to outlaw, and there was a bunch of laws, as you can imagine, because also Trump is president, trying to clamp down on the protest. And so this movement now has a bunch of anti-woke anti-this, now it's parental rights, et cetera, really rises to try to, and fairly successfully, to really clamp down on this movement calling for a more just society, not just in terms of identity, but in terms of economics, just a more egalitarian, more fare, more kind of society. And so this anti-woke stuff is the reaction. So that's where we start. 

Two other points, one, even though this starts and it's easy, I would maintain, it's easy to get people riled up around race. And I think that African Americans and other people of color, are not talking about race, they’re talking are racism. And they're talking about white supremacy, and they're talking about those things. So the backlash to this, these campaigns start off with race. So you have Christopher Rufo down there complaining, complaining, but it's actually the Trump administration and Trump himself that raises that anti- woke, anti whatever it is, miseducation disinformation campaign to a national level. He raises it to a national level by promulgating this executive order that basically says that Critical Race Theory and racism and these sorts of things are divisive. And you have to ask from whose perspective, But, he raises this to a national level. And so that's very important. But race is an easy entree in this country. So as much as people deny structural racism, as much as they deny deliberate and implicit kind of racism, it's easy. And Trump shows us in 2016 how easy it is to galvanize a group of people around racist action and beliefs, but it doesn't stay there.

It stays there for one hot minute before it becomes an attack on LGBTQ+ folks, it becomes an attack on Trans folks. And that attack is vicious. It only takes a moment. Race is simply the entree. You start really seeing what that backlash is about. So these people become targets of the attack, and it takes a moment, but eventually it gets kind of dressed up around parental rights. So both the anti-woke and the anti-CRT and the LGBTQ+ attacks get kind of dressed up around parental rights. But again, we have to ask who's parental rights? Because there's only one group of parental rights that they're concerned about. And then it becomes, oh, oh, we're concerned about the children. So interesting. We could certainly have a discussion about, if you've got a gender fluid person and they're young, when might be a good time to engage in some of those actions. It seems to me we could have a pretty civil conversation about that. But of course, that's not really what the stuff is about. It's about these people should not exist and how do we remove them from the public space? And this becomes our excuse. So I'm ungenerous, I can't be a spokesperson for CLC because I'm passionate and ungenerous about that movement. So it spread to Trans folks, an attack on Trans folks, their participation in public spaces, in schools, et cetera, et cetera. It expands more. It becomes about women. Keeps expanding. An in the middle of this attack about women that is misogynistic but kind of hidden, you have the Dobbs decision, so you get them all in full force. 

And the most recent targets have been students. And it's been carried by mainstream media and trying to get the idea out there that students are not the problem, that 600, over 600 laws and resolutions, banning a whole field and banning all kinds of discussions that have to do with the race, gender, sexuality. That banning that stuff, or trying to chill those conversations, that's not an abridgement of free speech, but students protesting what looks like, sounds like hate speech, but actually may actually be violent speech, violent speech, that's the problem. 600 laws and resolutions, et cetera. That's not the problem. Students protesting other problems. So that thing spans. 

So a conference, the conference, as it has developed over time, it's been to bring all these groups together in part, not just the critical thinkers, but also, you'll see that one of the blocks, the conference is divided into four blocks, and I'll back up. One is focused on a group called Circle and Women's Rights and the Dobbs case. It’s one of the things that we're looking at. So bringing all these groups who are under attack in very different kinds of ways together to talk about what does freedom of speech look like? What does, and this is one of the central ideas of the conference, what is academic freedom?

A majority of us, a lot of activists, but a majority of us are legal academicians, right? The legal academics. What does academic freedom mean and why is it under attack? Because it is under attack, both in terms of the voices that emanate from the academy, both professors and students, but also the institutions and institutions have been under attack for a long time. So what is it and how should it be protected and does US law protect it? And what does international law have to say about it. So we're bringing all these folks together to have that kind of discussion. And what do you do about on campus, violent speech on campus hate speech, what do you do about that? How might universities better handle that kind of situation? So those kinds of conversations. We have the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the motion of freedom of opinion and expression who is going to open up the conference to talk a little bit about academic freedom and those kinds of issues. We'll talk a little bit about campaigns of disinformation and how that undermines freedom of speech and the institutions. 

The conference also focuses on, and this is our second block, it's really focusing on unions and unionizing. There's been a lot of union activity this year, and I talked about folks under attack, teachers are under attack, right? Teachers are under attack. And so really focusing on the academy, how might we be in solidarity with those who are on the frontline, who are our K through 12 teachers, but also ourselves since universities, colleges are also under attack. And so focusing on unions from that perspective, but also from another perspective. And that is there is a lot of money, lots and lots of money, behind these censorship and miseducation and disinformation campaigns, lots of money. And that's corporate money. It's money from very wealthy people and it's money from corporations. They have funded this thing in the way they have funded the Republican party. And in the education realm, there has been a long history of trying to privatize public education. Taking where we see a trillion-dollar public good, they see a trillion-dollar market that they want to monopolize. So they have been trying to undermine, privatize. And we also see this an academy in terms of donors, lots of pressure backed by lots of money. How do you get at that? One way you get at that is to start thinking about unions. It's an expanded notion. So one is this idea of solidarity with folks who are on the frontline in what is really a hateful and mean-spirited backlash, on the one hand. And also trying to get at some of the power and money that's behind that backlash. And so there's this focus on you. So you bring all these people together, you start talking about what is academic freedom and guess what, it should extend to some of these through 12 teachers. And you start saying, okay, we have these bargaining units, and we are looking at Reverend Barber and we're seeing how that's working. 

And then third, we're talking about how do we keep critical thinking and critical thought in the forefront? Do we promote that? How do we fight for that? And at a basic level, how do we keep, for us law students, how do we make sure that they who are entering a very diverse workplace, very diverse clients, how do we help prepare them for that? And so the ABA in reaction to the Floyd murder and protest came up with standard 303, which says you have to expose students to ideas that make them culturally competent. You're going to need to expose them to racial justice projects, or the problem of racism or sexism or misogyny in the society, because that's what they're going out into. That's what they work in. And so they need to have that exposure. Well, as you can imagine, we are anticipating a real backlash to ABA standard 303. And so the idea is how do we then organize ourselves using the tools that we are learning around unionizing and solidarity to ensure that that standards stay in place. 

And then the final block with the four blocks is really kind of looking concretely at some of the Supreme Court cases that we find so troubling, Dobbs, the Affirmative Action case et cetera, the 303 LLC case. So that is a moment for us to do workshops around that, bring some interesting materials to the discussion of those very problematic cases. So substantive in a different way, substantive in a way in which we actually have a certain amount of expertise. We're talking about pedagogy and the substance of what we do, cases, law. And so that is our fourth block. 

And then in between we have panels that people have made proposals for, have submitted to the conference and organized these panels, different panels. And so that has really added a real richness to the conference as well. 

So that's our goals. That's what we've organized. We're very proud of it, conceptually. Now the question is will it be any good? Will we be able to pull it off? We've done a lot of work. How will it go? My hope is that it will be superb, and that people walk away with concrete skill, or some ideas about how to get their hands around some concrete skills in terms of the workshop, and lots of information from both the workshops but also all of these panels that are over. So that's the background. 

Logan:

And it may be too late for someone to get involved now, with the conference this year, but how can people get involved with CLC? Will you have more conferences or how can people get their foot in the door with your group?

Athena:

I think, this is a new group, so I like to say, as I often tell my students, we're making it up as we go along. We live in a particular time, a particular space. We have history to look to guide us, but we're going to have to be creative. And so it's very easy to become a part of CLC. We have simply a mailing list, and you can write me, or we have a website. We have the members of our coordinating committee listed. I think in time we'll have an actual sign up for membership plug on our website to get involved. But at this point, you can write me or anyone to get involved. So yes, we will have additional conferences. That's the easy part. But the more difficult part is what are our strategies? We don't have the backing, the money that the opposition has. We don't have that. We're activists. A lot of our activists are community-based. These are not rich people. We are academics and like most organizations, it's about begging to the different NGO foundations, funders, that sort of stuff. One of the things about being part of the labor movement though, is the labor movement is self-funded in a way that other industries, or I don't even know what to call it, segments of society are not. So I think that might provide us some assistance in terms of growing. But the question is, yeah, strategy. Where do we go from here knowing and what skills do we have? We won't have the money, but we might have power, people power, if we can bring enough people together. So yes, contact us and get on our mailing list and help us strategize. 

So the last day of the conference is about strategy and some of the institutions that already exist are centers at different schools. So The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy sponsored the CLC conference. And so we're looking for that in other spaces, in other schools, to grow and to develop people power and hopefully get some finance along the way. But for now, people can certainly write any of us. 

And we have been meeting for over a year every third Friday of the month from 4pm to about 5:30pm. So that's an open meeting. Anybody can come. Third Friday of every month we have a general meeting and different people show up every time. We have some regulars, but there's different people show up at meetings and they check in, and we thought about discontinuing it and folks said, no, this is a lifeline for us. So that's another way, actually much more direct. And we send that out. We send a letter out about that to a list that we have of about 800 people, but it's also posted on our website. It's also posted on the CLC Duke website. We meet every third Friday from 4pm to 5:30pm just to talk about where we are. 

Logan:

Is that a Zoom link? 

Athena:

That's a Zoom link. That is a Zoom link. So that's another way to just get involved and start making a contribution, helping us to develop a strategy. We have a hub for syllabi. If you are interested in teaching critical thought, Critical Race Theory, we have a hub for that. And we also have a hub where you can go in and just pick up bibliographies on critical theory, on Critical Race Theory, on ClassCrit stuff, on LatCrit stuff, that sort of stuff. So we want the information, people don't know, we want the information out there. And some of that is on our website as well. So there's a lot of kind of ways to…

Logan:

Move yourself in there.

Athena:

…to move yourself into it. And we've got a whole student group called Students and Recent Grads, and they will be there. We have student presenters on the program. We have a couple of student workshops that are student led. And so lots of ways, I think, to people to connect.

Logan:

Is that for students within the law school that they could be a part of?

Athena:

Absolutely. Students of all sorts. They can be a part of. They send out emails usually. I think there'll be a lot more ways to plug into that after…

Logan:

Post-conference.

Athena:

…post-conference because there will be a lot of students there. And there are two students here, of course, Deja Graham and Katherine Kio are attending the conference. They have lots of information that if students are interested, they can come, they can get involved, bring your own talents to the table. We need all the kind of ideas and energy we can get.

Logan:

Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to edit the podcast in time for the conference, so I apologize to listeners now if this comes out after the conference or after the registration has closed. But I'm sure that in the future there'll be more for them to attend and more for them to do. But I want to be respectful of your time. So thank you very much for joining us today.

Athena:

Oh, it was my pleasure. As you can see, I love to talk about it.

Logan:

Well, it's important to speak on, so I appreciate it.

That was Professor of Law Athena Matua, and this has been The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast produced by the University at Buffalo. If you would like to learn more about the Critical (Legal) Collective or want to get involved, we'll leave a link for you in the description below. Let us know what you think by visiting our Twitter @baldycenter, or emailing us at baldycenter@buffalo.edu. To learn more about the Center, visit our website buffalo.edu/baldcenter. The theme music for this season was composed by Matias Homar. My name is Logan and on behalf of The Baldy Center, thank you for listening.

Transcription ends.