Historically, ideology has been co-opted to justify and mask racism and oppression in America – this will only continueCharles R. Lawrence 83 (“Review: ‘Justice’ or ‘Just Us’: Racism and the Role of Ideology,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Apr., 1983), pp. 831-856) Charles Lawrence is a professor of Law at Georgetown University, and has taught at UCLA, USC, Berkeley, and Harvard since 1974 with an expertise in antidiscrimation law and Critical Race Theory

The legal system-along with academia and the church has been a principal vehicle for the development and transmission of ideological thought. The history of the ideology of American race relations illustrates the central role which these institutions have played in creating and disseminating images that justify this country's treatment of blacks while at the same time concealing and distorting its reality. Slavery was justified through a Christian ideology that saw Africans as nonhumans, heathens, or the descendants of Ham. Enslavement was explained both as just punishment (i.e., "the sins of the father shall be visited…”) and as the means of salvation for an infidel race that did not know God. The rejection of a slave-based economy and the resultant civil war and emancipation required a new ideology. Reconstruction conceded personhood to blacks and granted them nominal' constitutional protections, but whites still treated them as social untouchables and denied them access to white-only schools, jobs, and housing. Now academia supplied the ideology of oppression-Social Darwinism -which stated that Nature's will dictated that the superior prevail over the inferior. Segregation was justified because social intermingling would endanger the existence of the white race and the Anglo-Saxon civilization. Today, racial injustice finds its justification not in the commands of God or Nature but in the law.49 Although the equal protection clause gives us a legal command to treat all persons equally, the Court has created a set of ideological images that condition our societal conception of equality. For example, the law tells us that (1) even when blacks are obviously being treated differently because of their race they are not really being wrongfully discriminated against or denied equal opportunity so long as the discrimination is not intentional;50 (2) even when there is evidence of intentional race-based discrimination, no one has been constitutionally injured unless the discriminators used the government as their instrument of discrimination;51 and (3) all individuals must be viewed as similarly situated, i.e., they all begin the competition at the same starting line, and therefore must be treated the same. Thus, without proof of specific, government-sponsored, racially motivated discrimination, any injury that might bring blacks to the competition with an obvious disadvantage does not legally exist and may not be taken into account.52 These principles create an illusion of equal treatment which takes the place of reality. The law requires that we treat blacks and whites equally. We are a law-abiding country, and the courts tell us that in the vast majority of instances the law is obeyed. Thus, if we are treating blacks and whites equally, and blacks continue to be disproportionately represented at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, it must either be because they are failing to avail themselves of the opportunities available to them or because they are not capable of availing themselves of those opportunities. This ideological illusion replaces the reality of continued racial exclusion. The ideology of equal opportunity tells us that the barriers of segregation and discrimination have been removed: If blacks continue to fail it must be because they are inferior.53 The idea that modern equal protection law is part of an ideology that serves the needs of a particular group-elite whites-has been an important theme in the writing of Allan Freeman. In a truly perceptive analysis of legal scholarship in the area of equal protection doctrine, Freeman found that the prevailing approach has involved "quests for new formalisms, toward shared values that can be hauled out as objective references against which to test and evaluate the outcomes of seeming conflicts."54 He contrasts this focus on the possibility of consensus with his own view that legal doctrine emerges from a " continuing dialectic of

struggle, characterized by value clashes that share no . . . agreed-upon reference point."55 He wonders aloud why within legal scholarship he finds himself a relatively lonely voice in asking questions like "What shared values are asserted?" "Whose values are they?" "In whose interests do they exist as values?" and "What do they presuppose?"56