Chapter 7 queries how the law addresses evolving concepts such as intentionality, intersectionality, and multiracial identities. In a common law system, legal precedents are static even though public understanding of race in society has expanded dramatically. This chapter explores the historic requirement to demonstrate evidence of an intent to discriminate to justify intervention by the law, which emerged from a traditional understanding of racism as personal and purposeful. Despite the potential harm of neutral policies creating disparate damages in racialized communities, this barrier to governmental action and its concomitant justification for neglect, matters. Students will explore the inability of the law to address multiple racial identities simultaneously and the legal consequences of ignoring intersectionality. The text considers a proposed constitutional amendment to address this limitation. Finally, the law’s hesitance to address multiracial identities is explored, questioning whether current legal structure is adequate to address contemporary understandings of racism and racial discrimination.

Chapter 4 examines the consequences when the state does not protect the security of people within its realm because of their race, and how this negligence intersects with the contemporary criminal justice system. The chapter focuses on current arguments surrounding Black Lives Matter and similar movements in Latino and Native communities regarding state violence against communities of color. The primary sources examine several criminal justice protections provided under the Constitution, consider the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirements of state and federal governments, and question how the government protects the people against itself and from White majorities. Readers may engage with the continuing debates around the responsibility of governments to ensure that policing is not racialized and consider the most just specific policies or legal interpretations focusing on the accountability of state actors. The chapter conncludes by exploring the potential of the constitutional requirement of a jury of peers for criminal prosecution may hinder the exercise of state-sanctioned racialized violence.

An East Asian community of states based on shared cultural and institutional models matured in the seventh–tenth centuries. Beginning in the mid seventh century, Japan completely transformed itself according to Chinese-style codes of penal and administrative law. A unified and independent Korea, after 676, maintained a careful balance between native traditions and prestigious Chinese models. In China itself, the great Tang dynasty consolidated a more homogeneously Chinese culture and identity. Even South Asian Buddhism was domesticated. But the tenth century then brought changes of dynasty to both China and Korea, independence for what becomes Vietnam, and gradually emerging new directions in Japan, including weakening of the imperial government, the emergence of samurai warriors, and the flourishing of Japanese language literature.

Chapter 6 investigates the legal options to ameliorate historic approaches to race, allowing the United States to more closely align with its national ideals. Over time, different branches of government developed strategies to ameliorate the damage caused by institutionalized racism. However, courts have wrestled with the question of how these remedies might reify race – making it more central to American life – or destroy the unique aspects of communities, forged by their shared experiences fo race, in an effort to provide greater equality. The chapter asks if the law and Constitution require public institutions to be color-blind in their treatment of race, or does the racial history of the nation demand color-conscious remedies. The text traces the evolution of affirmative action, especially in education, as a means of compensating for generational exclusion and the Supreme Court’s changing perception on color blindness as a constitutional principle.. The treatment of those U.S. territories that have not been granted statehood, where the majority of the population are people of color is explored. Finally, recent expansions to Native sovereignty are examined and the reader is asked to consider the impact of such protections on Native equality.

This chapter describes the founding of the ancient Zhou Dynasty and its early articulation of Mandate of Heaven theory, which legitimated changes of Chinese dynasties. The loosely centralized Zhou eventually disintegrated into fully independent kingdoms called the Warring States. This became a time of cultural and intellectual ferment that gave birth to the Hundred Schools of classical Chinese thought, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Confucianism eventually became a defining feature of all East Asia. More immediately, Legalism helped transform the Qin kingdom into the most powerful of the Warring States, conquer all its rivals, and forge the first Chinese imperial dynasty. Qin excesses led to its rapid collapse, but Qin was succeeded by a more enduring Han Dynasty based on similar, though more moderate, imperial institutions. After four centuries of Han imperial unity, it too collapsed into warlordism, followed by the famous Three Kingdoms period.

The Introduction explains what East Asia is and how it is defined here: which is culturally, primarily in terms of shared use of the Chinese writing system, shared institutional models, Confucianism, and common forms of Buddhism. It argues that East Asia has changed greatly over time and is internally diverse, but that there are also important commonalities and continuities. The relatively recent origins of some traditions are also discussed. East Asias global importance and continued relevance are emphasized.

Chapter 5 queries how cultural and community identities legally intersect with issues of race. Here readers explore how the law wrestles with the relationship between laws and cultural customs and norms within racialized communities. The text asks the reader to determine if the law should treat discrimination against cultural expressions frequently connected to race, such as hair style or language, with the same scrutiny as racial discrimination. Scholars and the courts have disagree about the relationship between the two and the text engages this debate by presenting different scholarly attempts to resolve this conflict. In this chapter students will explore the statutorily protected capacity of Native communities to privilege the adoption of children of indigenous descent into Native families over White families. Another significant question emerges from the excerpted cases of whether Native tribal communities in the United States are racial or political entities. The answer to this question impacts core questions of political autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the social constructions of other racial identities.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, China’s weakness provoked crisis, and new Western-inspired ideas of nationalism were taking root in East Asia. A Nationalist Revolution in 1911–1912 replaced the Qing Empire with a new Republic of China, and rejection of Chinese tradition was promoted by the “New Youth” of the May Fourth Movement. After the first president of the republic died, China dissolved into warlordism. Under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party struggled to reunify China. In 1905 the Japanese defeated Russia in war and acquired Russian facilities in Manchuria. Korea became a Japanese colony, which the Japanese attempted to assimilate. But Japanese rule in Korea was harsh and discriminatory, and a spirit of Korean nationalism was brewing. In the Japanese home islands, universal adult male suffrage was implemented in 1925, and Japan had become a multi-party democracy. In French colonial Vietnam, the 1920s brought accelerating French investment, and Western influences, ranging from Hollywood movies to Marxism. But, despite the appeal of the ideals of the French Revolution, many Vietnamese people felt excluded.

The formation of “gunpowder empires,” extensive international maritime trade, and the emergence of commercialized consumer culture in parts of East Asia all mark the beginnings of an Early Modern age in roughly the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, products native to the Americas such as chili peppers, peanuts, and tobacco were already present in East Asia, and silver from the Americas flowed into China to pay for Chinese exports. But China, after 1644, fell under the rule of the Manchu Banner People from beyond the Great Wall in the northeast, who then expanded the empire to include Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Korea, meanwhile, had only limited foreign contacts during this period, and became pervasively Confucianized. Japan was reunified in the late sixteenth century following a period of division, and the great reunifier Tokugawa Ieyasu founded Japan’s last Shogunate in 1603. The Tokugawa Shogunate became a time of prolonged peace and relative isolation, during which significant economic developments helped prepare Japan for later industrialization and undermined the old hereditary socio-political order.

China was plunged into four centuries of almost continuous division following the collapse of the Han Dynasty. Most of the empires and kingdoms in north China during this period, moreover, had ethnically non-Han Chinese rulers. Despite the remarkably multiethnic character of the era, however, there was also considerable institutional and cultural continuity. A cosmopolitan elite culture took shape, which notably included originally South Asian Buddhism but also many Chinese political traditions and literacy in the written Chinese language, that was shared now throughout East Asia. While Korea during this period was neither unified nor uniform, and Japan was also just in the process of unifying, organized and fully historical states in both Korea and Japan first emerged in this period. Meanwhile, the nucleus of what would become Vietnam remained loosely part of empires based in China during these years.