'JUSTICE AT WAR' | A review Dialogue on civil rights, race likely won't interest laypeople

The story is a cover for a series of essays.
By DANIEL ZANTZINGER
SCRIPPS HOWARD
"Justice at War: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights During Times of Crisis" by Richard Delgado (New York University Press, $29.95)
"Justice at War" by University of Colorado law professor Richard Delgado is the latest in his unusual "Rodrigo Chronicles" series.
This missive by a progressive civil-rights-law academic isn't for everybody. Lengthy monologues on racial issues, footnotes and pages of references, endless debates on topic after topic, and incisive theoretical examinations may be the meat and potatoes for law students and professors, judges and civil-rights activists, but perhaps not for the average reader.
The story is really a cover for a series of essays that seem better suited for the classroom. It serves best as an academic vehicle for Delgado's and others' Critical Race Theory, an interdisciplinary legal approach that addresses the persistence of inequality and racism in the post-Civil Rights era.
The essays are embedded in a story related by Gustavus -- a k a the Professor -- a veteran of decades of civil-rights legal struggles who is in the last stages of a long and eminent teaching career. He engages his former student cum law-school graduate Rodrigo Crenshaw in an ongoing series of discussions that focus on race, civil rights -- and their erosion within the context of the war on terrorism -- First Amendment protections, the limits of liberalism and the racial realism that infuses all of law and society.
Critique of liberalism
Rodrigo's intellectual prowess shines through in his critique of the orthodoxy of liberalism, of faith in the system of civil-rights litigation and activism, and of the concept of incrementalism. The historical emergence, development and transformation of the concept of race that are fundamental to his set of proposed civil-rights theories are articulated well enough. He paints a convincing picture of the history of racism and the system that perpetuates it.
The solutions extolled are idealistic, bordering on the naive. In one discussion, "Rodrigo's Response to International Terrorism," the character is asked by his mother to spell out his solution to the spreading world crisis of attacks on civilians because of ideological differences.
"It's nothing out of the ordinary. It's simply to make friends with your neighbors if you haven't done so already," Rodrigo answers. He goes on to theorize that if we unconditionally and voluntarily paid countries that hate the United States money currently used to develop weapons, the world would be a more secure place.
Little tension
For all its discussions about the erosion of Americans' civil liberties, race and the related concepts of identity, class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality and religion, "Justice at War" has almost no racial, economic or chauvinistic tension.
Quite the opposite: The discussions are mild, thoughtful, egalitarian and civilized. Everyone is equally informed, and the whole lot commune in a calm and agreeable, almost somnolent fashion. The conversations take place over dinner, at the grocery store and between diaper changes. There are no marches on city hall, no reaction to the trashing of their institute's office, no bitterness about a temporary exile. There are no heated arguments, and no one is threatened for his or her beliefs.
There is almost no real action interspersed with the dialogues, just mundane reality to connect the reader to the next essay.
Though there are rare moments of mild tension and excitement with the brief disappearance of Rodrigo and the incipient development of the Professor's interracial romantic relationship, the tame story line is subordinate to the social theories Delgado examines. The book is neither riveting nor compelling, and the theories formulated and proposed are really not new or substantial enough to stimulate practical changes on the ground.
XContact Daniel Zantzinger of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Co., at http://www.dailycamera.com.