• Introduction

 

The articles by Professors Saito and Gott offer a whole new perspective on the significance of Korematsu and its progeny and, in doing so, have not only expanded my understanding of the wartime Internments, but have also helped me clarify some fundamental points of commonality between emerging Asian Pacific American Critical Legal Scholarship⁽⁷⁾ [hereinafter "APACrit"] and LatCrit Theory.⁽⁸⁾ Accordingly, my objectives in this essay are first, to map out some of these commonalities, focusing on three themes in particular; ⁽⁹⁾ second, to reflect on the contributions APACrit/LatCrit cross-fertilizations can make toward the articulation of a broader and more inclusive framework for the production of outsider scholarship and coalitional politics; and finally, to illustrate the value of this cross-fertilization by focusing specifically on the way that Professors Saito's and Gott's work on the WW II Internments of Japanese Americans and Latin Americans have enriched my own theoretical perspectives in the field of International Criminal Law.
 

• Articulating APACrit and LatCrit Commonalities: Three Themes Beyond the Black/White Paradigm

Second, discovered commonalities can shed new light on structures and processes of domination, whose logic, histories and modes of operation might otherwise remain invisible. While some have coded the WWII Internments as an unfortunate anomaly or unique event attributable to war-time hysteria and therefore unlikely to be repeated, recognizing the linkage between these events and other instances where the U.S. legal system fails to protect against grievous rights violations reveals that this "failure" is not so much a malfunction as an expression or manifestation of the systemic and structural ways in which law is permeated with the racial logic of white supremacy. In seeing our commonalities, we see these structural and systemic dimensions more clearly, even as seeing the structural dimensions of oppression helps sharpen the focus of our coalitional efforts.⁽¹²⁾
 

Finally, a deeper understanding of our commonalities provides the needed foundation for the equally necessary task of together confronting and embracing our differences. Too often, fear of difference has led to the denial of difference and thereby to the suppression of the kinds of solidarity that enable new possibilities of thought and action. ⁽¹³⁾ The ability to embrace difference is, therefore, a fundamental objective and a necessary evolution in the further progress of coalitional theory and politics. That ability, however, depends upon some recognized commonality or pre-established commitment to solidarity that can make the encounter with difference a meaningful vehicle for expanding our understandings of "self and/as/in the Other," rather than triggering a retreat into ourselves -- a return to the familiar. Put differently, I think the articulation of commonalities is as central as respect for difference to coalescing any movement or project that would make anti-subordination the measure of its ethical and epistemological integrity -- both are crucial elements in constructing dynamic and authentic community. This is because the particularities of difference help combat the essentialist assumptions that oftentimes blind us to each others' realities, even as the effort to articulate commonalities commits us to search and uncover the universals that should bind us in solidarity, despite and, indeed, because of our particularities. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In the case of Asian Pacific Americans and Latinas/os, it is certainly time to articulate these commonalities and see where they lead.

Interestingly enough, the recognition of our commonalities is one of the single-most effective ways of complying with Mr. Fred Koramatsu's request that in remembering the past, we keep our eyes and energies fixed on the future. ⁽¹⁵⁾ At the cusp of the 21^st century, ours is a future where the struggle for justice will increasingly be mapped around the activation and proliferation of new, plural and intersectional political identities, like the Japanese Latin Americans of whom Professor Saito writes. In this future, the struggle against subordination will also confront new problems and possibilities generated by the increasingly accelerated inter-penetration of local/global processes, institutions and aspirations, and the new political identities they will activate. Political alliances, normative legitimacy and emancipatory aspirations will have to be forged among and against the multiplicity of political perspectives and self-defined interests that will (and should) seek to influence the ways in which the reconfiguration of domestic and international legal regimes is currently imagined and/or already underway.⁽¹⁶⁾
 

In articulating points of commonality, APACrit and LatCrit scholars need also remember to invoke and advance the substantial breakthroughs already achieved as a result of our joint and several encounters with the limitations of the Black-White paradigm. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Theorizing a broader understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of white supremacy has been central to the work of both LatCrit and APACrit scholars. ⁽¹⁸⁾ This work has already made significant theoretical and political advances by focusing our attention on recurrent conflicts over immigration law and language rights and by importing these and related issues into the critical legal analysis of white supremacy and its articulation in legal norms, processes and institutions, both within and beyond the United States.
 

From this perspective, calls to center Latinas/os and/or to center "the immigrant," like earlier calls to center "women of color," reflect affirmative efforts to construct an anti-subordination theory and praxis beyond the essentialism that has thus far prioritized the racial fault line between Black and white Americans at the expense of more expansive anti-subordination agendas and more inclusive coalitional politics. This is not to say that the call to move beyond the Black/White paradigm is a call to decenter the legal struggle against racial discrimination or to deny the particular and pervasive forms of discrimination suffered by Black Americans. ⁽¹⁹⁾ It is rather a call to expand the parameters of our anti-subordination agenda by foregrounding the myriad ways in which white supremacy is embedded in a network of interconnected and mutually reinforcing structures of privilege. LatCrit theory does this by centering Latinas/os -- a move that enables, indeed requires, an expansive reconceptualization of the anti-subordination agenda we inherited from Critical Race Theory precisely because Latina/o identity constitutes the intersection of multiple racialized identities even as Latina/o subordination clearly implicates many fault-lines other than race. ⁽²⁰⁾
 

The political implications of these multiple fault lines for the future of anti-subordination theory are being addressed from two particularly promising directions. One approach focuses on the historical, social, political, economic and cultural relations and structures that create stratifications in and between Latina/o and Asian Pacific American communities. This approach makes intra-group divisions and hierarchies an explicit focus of critical attention.⁽²¹⁾ Indeed, the initial emphasis in LatCrit Theory on mapping intra-Latina/o identity politics reflects a collective project to explore differences, invoke commonalities, reveal hierarchies and promote solidarities in and across the multiple configurations of Latina/o identity expressed in and between Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, Mexican-American, South and Central American and Indigenous communities. Rather than suppressing or ignoring these multiple intra-group differences for the sake of some false commonality, this approach seeks to identify the historical events and the institutional and social arrangements which initially produced and currently reproduce intra-Latina/o divisions, stratifications and antagonisms in order precisely to dismantle them. ⁽²²⁾
 

The important point is that even this anti-essentialist move would be incomplete if LatCrit scholars were to fail, for example, to recognize and engage the parallel anti-subordination projects confronting APACrit legal scholars, or vice versa, if APACrits should fail to see themselves present and implicated in the LatCrit project. From this perspective, Professor Saito's decision to analyze the wartime Internments through a case study of the particular experiences and legal tribulations of Japanese Peruvians is a truly remarkable, breath-taking and path-breaking intervention.⁽²³⁾ Her analysis not only foregrounds the compelling justice claims of a group rendered all but invisible by the overlapping essentialism of both the Japanese American and the non-Japanese Latina/o imagineries of identity; it also paves the way for an anti-essentialist analysis of the way these intersectional identities and, by implication, others like the Filipina/o identity, are constituted by and reflective both of the historical processes that initially produced them and of the contemporary power relations that currently marginalize them. By foregrounding the marginalized and intersectional identities that link Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans, Professor Saito shows how LatCrit and APACrit legal theory can produce particularly revealing windows into the way white supremacy articulates within the history of U.S. colonialism and the current structures of international law.⁽²⁴⁾
 

A second approach for addressing multiple inter and intra-group fault lines begins by politicizing the existential contradictions Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans oftentimes suffer as we attempt to reposition ourselves within the various overlapping and intersecting hierarchies we inhabit. ⁽²⁵⁾ Put differently, this means politicizing the configuration of choices we simultaneously confront and create as we work to develop new strategies for escaping "the bottom" without scratching for "the top." This attention to and politicization of the internal life of subordinated individuals may, in turn, enable a more profound articulation of the ethical commitments underpinning anti-subordination legal scholarship. This is because attention to the psycho-spiritual consequences of enforced subordination links the pursuit of coalitional theory and praxis directly to the human imperative of liberation that each of us in different ways experiences and, hence, more directly to the pursuit of a genuinely common good or objective justice, as opposed to the instrumental alliances and special interest politics of intra-group elites.⁽²⁶⁾

The important point is that in neither instance does a recognition of intra-group divisions or of the multiplicity of Latina/o subject positions, in any way, suggest that political identity is simply "a language game."⁽²⁷⁾ On the contrary, LatCrit Theory emphasizes the existence of multiple hierarchies within Latina/o communities in order to develop a deeper, more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the relations through which Latinas/os, and similarly situated others, are constructed to be both oppressed and oppressors. LatCrit Theory likewise acknowledges that most Latinas/os have access to any number of possible subject positions precisely because this acknowledgment foregrounds the contingent and therefore political nature of the identity positions actually embraced. It is precisely the multiplicity of possible positions that makes the formation of political identity an existential challenge because this multiplicity reflects the many different alliances around which Latinas/os might potentially choose to define our purpose, interests, values and objectives, that is, to construct our identities. ⁽²⁸⁾
 

By the same token, this multiplicity does not mean that all positions are equally legitimate nor that the legitimacy of any particular subject position can never be judged. It means rather that Latinas/os, like Asian Pacific Americans, often confront the choice to align with the oppressors or the oppressed - the chance, in different contexts, to pass or be passed. Judging political positions from an anti-subordination perspective means assessing whether a particular position promotes domination of, separation from or solidarity with the oppressed, given the particular configurations of power at any given moment. It also means asking critical and self-critical questions about the kinds of issues and concerns LatCrit scholars tend to center in LatCrit Theory and the way the particularities of otherwise marginalized and intersectional Latina/o identities, like Asian, Black and Indigenous identities, will be thematized in LatCrit discourse. ⁽²⁹⁾
 

Understood from this perspective, it should be clear that the call to move beyond the Black/White paradigm is a call to expand, not to reject, the anti-racist commitments that have thus far guided Critical Race Theory. At the same time, it should also be clear that moving beyond this paradigm means much more than simply replacing Latinas/os and/or Asian Pacific Americans at the center of our critical legal theories. It means, on the contrary, taking a stance against all forms of subordination, both between and within subordinated groups. The articles by Professors Saito and Gott are two brilliant illustrations of the wide range of issues an anti-essentialist approach can introduce into the critical analysis of white supremacy and of the law's role in its reproduction. I want to emphasize three themes in particular because they are so central, both to the different ways in which Professors Saito and Gott each analyze the implications of the wartime Internments and to my own understanding of the kinds of overlapping commonalities around which LatCrits and APACrits might meaningfully map out an anti-essentialist anti-subordination project located somewhere in/between APACrit and LatCrit legal scholarship and beyond the Black/White paradigm.⁽³⁰⁾

The first theme is the centrality of international law and relations to the theoretical analysis and political transformations that are often implicated in dealing with the particular kinds of subordination common to many Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans. ⁽³¹⁾ This centrality is immediately apparent in the fact that Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans often tend to experience and express their political identities in transnational or cross-cultural terms. ⁽³²⁾ When Professor Keith Aoki recounts the story of his mother telling him, as a boy, that he shouldn't play at killing "japs" because he is himself, after all, a "jap," ⁽³³⁾ he illustrates one of the ways in which transnational identities can interrupt the narrative scripts that are endlessly replayed around modernist categories of race, class and nation. Not being comfortable killing "japs" may be experienced as a natural or necessary consequence of being a "jap," or it may be that being one of the "japs" targeted for imagined destruction offers a vantage point - an avenue of insight -- into how it might be wrong to play at killing anyone. The story illustrates how transnational identities can be the source of existential crisis -- the kinds of crisis that trigger particular kinds of identity questions and choices -- in this case, questions that often make explicit and compelling the normative and political imperative of rejecting the nationalist's imaginery in favor of a more universal humanism. After all, the rigid nationalism of "my country wrong or right" can only cause pain and confusion when we see that "the Other" is ourSelf and, particularly if by extension, we should ever come to see that anyOther is aSelf.

But Aoki's story is particularly interesting because it testifies also to the fact that being a "jap" may not be enough, in itself, to activate the kinds of existential challenges that expand identity and make possible a broader understanding of "self and/as/in the Other." That challenge depends, at least for many of us, on the extent to which we either make the commitment in solidarity to remind ourselves or are reminded by others. Thus, while transnational identities are often internally experienced by and/or externally imposed upon Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans as a result of the conflation of race/ethnicity and "foreignness," ⁽³⁴⁾ the political potential embedded in these identities provides only one of the reasons for centering the international in LatCrit and APACrit legal scholarship. The other reason has to do with the way the structure and history of international relations is implicated in the production of racial subordination both within and beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States.
 

Viewed from beyond the Black/White paradigm, the WW II Internments of Japanese Americans and Latin Americans, as recounted and analyzed in different ways by Gott and Saito, provide prima facie evidence that the theoretical analysis and transformation of racial subordination, not just outside, but also within the United States, implicate a whole range of anti-subordination projects currently located at the intersection, or rather disjuncture, of domestic and international legal regimes. For example, Professor Saito's account of the justice denied Japanese Peruvians despite the exhaustion of domestic legal remedies raises important questions about the limitations of any anti-racist agenda that relies exclusively on domestic legal process and institutions. ⁽³⁵⁾ If national courts can be expected routinely to confer impunity on national elites through the interpretative manipulation of domestic laws and constitutional doctrines, then Professor Saito is surely correct to suggest that the elimination of white supremacy depends at least in part on securing the domestic enforcement of international human rights norms and the creation of effective international legal forums for the prosecution of human rights violations. ⁽³⁶⁾
 

While Saito's analysis uses the wartime Internments to center international law in the project of producing anti-racist legal theory and praxis, Professor Gott uses them to reveal how the articulation of white supremacy is linked to fundamental conceptual structures that dichotomize the domestic and international as fields of state action governed by very different norms. In this dichotomy, the domestic is constituted as a realm of government under the rule of law, while the international marks a realm of power politics in pursuit of national interests and the defense of national security. ⁽³⁷⁾ Gott's analysis shows how this dichotomy enables American legal and political discourse to legitimate the consolidation and deployment of imperial power by government elites without directly threatening the national myth that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. ⁽³⁸⁾
 

Through his analysis of the Internment cases, Professor Gott shows how the domestic/international dichotomy legitimates a sociolegal reality in which subordinated groups outside U.S. jurisdiction confront the blatantly asserted and transparent impunity of the only remaining superpower, unprotected, and with no effective legal recourse either domestically or internationally. At the same time, subordinated groups within the United States remain always potentially vulnerable to the impunity of the imperial at any moment national elites declare that the domestic realm has been penetrated by a "foreign" threat. The vulnerability of domestic minorities is particularly apparent given the fact that race and "foreignness" are so easily conflated in the master narratives of white supremacy, as brutally evidenced by the Internment cases. It is also apparent given that the international/domestic dichotomy has rarely prevented the domestic deployment of unconstitutional police powers, otherwise prohibited by the rule of law norms presumably applicable in the domestic realm, in instances where elite visions of "national security" are deemed at risk of foreign aggression.⁽³⁹⁾ By disguising this sociolegal reality, the domestic/international dichotomy legitimates a structure of power that makes subordinated groups extremely vulnerable to the activation of white supremacist repression both inside and outside the United States. ⁽⁴⁰⁾
 

The important point is that centering the international enables both Professors Gott and Saito to offer significant new insights into how the struggle against white supremacy is potentially linked to a wide range of anti-subordination projects that have targeted the structure of international relations and the inter-state system as central sites of liberation activism. This move represents a fundamental advance beyond the Black/White paradigm because Critical Race Theory, like the mainstream power centers of the American civil rights movement, has until recently conceptualized its anti-racist agenda as concerned, for the most part, with the impact of domestic law and legal process on the struggle for racial justice in this country. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Thus, the institutional structures, state practices and substantive doctrines organized by and around the absences of international law, not to mention the exceedingly problematic relationship between international and domestic legal regimes, have rarely been analyzed from a Critical Race perspective -- apparently because most RaceCrits have assumed that such issues are largely irrelevant to the struggle for racial justice.
 

By contrast, the multiple absences of international law constitute an important point of reference in and between APACrit and LatCrit critical scholarship precisely because many Latinas/os, like many Asian Pacific Americans, often experience their subordination as directly linked to the geopolitical conflicts of the inter-state system and the ideologies of racial and/or cultural superiority through which dominant states seek to legitimate their interventions, expropriations, conquests and domination of weaker states. ⁽⁴²⁾ The plight of Japanese Americans interned during WWII is just one example of the way inter-state conflicts have, throughout this country's history, been articulated in the configuration of domestic repression, the activation of racialized public discourses, as well as in the ebb and flow of race hate crimes.⁽⁴³⁾
 

From the Mexican and the Spanish-American Wars, through the Cuban Revolution to the more recent interstate conflicts over U.S. drug war policies in the hemisphere, many Latinas/os have experienced subordination as profoundly impacted, though in different ways, by the consequences of interstate conflicts and alliances. Given this history, it is no surprise that the relationship between the international and the domestic emerged as an early and central theme in LatCrit Theory. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ By centering international law and relations in anti-subordination critical legal analysis, both APACrit and LatCrit Theory are poised to see more clearly the direct relationship between the lived experience of subordination and the historic and continuing failures of the international legal system to establish the rule of law, to control the expansionary and interventionist practices of superpower foreign policy, and to ensure the incorporation of international human rights laws into domestic legal systems.
 

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In different ways, both Professors Gott and Saito also center the concept of national security as a major theme in their analysis of the wartime Internments of Japanese Americans and Latin Americans. Gott's article uses a critical account of the way national security ideology was invoked in Korematsu and Hirabayashi to launch a profound and multilayered assault on the basic assumptions and conceptual structures that organize the field of foreign affairs in U.S. constitutional law. In one breath-taking move, Gott extracts Korematsu and its progeny from their familiar location within the field of equal protection jurisprudence and reinserts them into the alien universe of Foreign Affairs and National Security Law. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ Through this simple, but brilliant shift in the frame of precedential references, Gott is able to deconstruct "the rigid territorial distinction between outside and inside that has lead to the treatment of [foreign affairs and national security] law as an area of analysis apart from the 'normal' rule of law." Located in this other discursive universe, the Internment cases interrupt and destabilize familiar constitutional debates. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Significantly, they challenge the happy assumption that "the rule of law" in a constitutional democracy can withstand the consequences of a constitutional jurisprudence that condones the exercise of imperial power by restricting the legal accountability of national elites to actions in the domestic realm, while conferring impunity for otherwise unconstitutional and indeed criminal actions taken in the field of foreign affairs. ⁽⁴⁷⁾
 

If the political branches of government, whether acting unilaterally or only when in concert, have the authority to organize, consolidate and deploy unconstitutional powers abroad, what's to prevent them from using these powers "at home?" The answer offered by both the realist and liberal positions in the constitutional debates is that, of course, the internal/external dichotomy secures the rule of law and the accountability of the state in domestic affairs. But this is precisely where Professor Gott's reading of the Internment cases produces a profound interruption and disruption of this received unwisdom. Reading the Internment cases as foreign affairs and national security law precedents not only foregrounds the ways in which national security ideology destabilizes the internal/external dichotomy, thereby rendering the domestic realm perpetually vulnerable to the internal deployment of imperial state power; this way of reading the cases also raises critical questions about the role of national security ideology in the reproduction of white supremacy and, conversely, exposes the legitimating functions of white supremacy in the articulation of national security ideology. What after all is the meaning of American "national security," when its pursuit renders American nationals so profoundly insecure against the coercive actions of government elites? ⁽⁴⁸⁾
 

According to Professor Gott, the underlying concept of national security has escaped critical scrutiny, and Jules Lobel was, therefore, right to suggest that "[r]evitalizing the liberal legal paradigm requires a substantive redefinition of United States national security that does not necessitate the present imperial responsibility which inevitably leads to continued crisis." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ The pending question for LatCrit and APACrit theory is what such a redefinition of national security might look like. Certainly, Gott's analysis reveals the negative: national security cannot be equated with the projection of state power to enforce "the national will" since the national will, if genuinely probed in any particular crisis, would quickly fragment along the fissures of race, class and other such divisions within the American society.⁽⁵⁰⁾ To say that this very threat of internal fragmentation is the reason why, in times of national crisis, the state must be granted the authority to deploy unilaterally such coercive power as necessary to ensure national security simply begs the question as to which of these fragments constitutes the national interest on behalf of which the state is empowered to act. Is "national security" most directly implicated in the project of protecting domestic order against the machinations of foreign enemies or of protecting racial minorities against race-based persecution and imprisonment? Viewed from an anti-essentialist anti-subordination perspective, Gott's deconstructive analysis poses a fundamental challenge: that is, to find a way of answering the question of what is or is not in the interests of national security without reinscribing the myth of a unitary state in which elite special interests are routinely conflated with the national interest at the expense of non-elite interests.⁽⁵¹⁾
 

Interestingly, Professor Saito's intervention suggests one meaningful way of distinguishing elite interests from the national interest and, in the process, redefining the substantive meaning of national security. Her article recounts and critically assesses the implications of the U.S. government's treatment of Japanese Latin Americans both during World War II and, more recently, in its efforts to settle their 1997 class action in Mochizuki v. United States. ⁽⁵²⁾ During World War II, these individuals were forcibly removed from their homes, separated from their families, dispossessed of their property and deported from all parts of Latin America, but primarily from Peru, to be imprisoned as hostages in U.S. internment camps and later deported to Japan, once again against their will.
 

Certainly, one of Professor Saito's prime objectives is to demonstrate the centrality of international law to any future hopes of securing basic justice for these Japanese-Peruvian victims of U.S. war crimes. But Saito's analysis does more than develop compelling arguments for the domestic application of international law and for strengthening the enforcement capacities of international tribunals. Over and again, she emphasizes the substantial costs, measured in terms of this country's loss of stature and legitimacy, its exposure to even further liability and to the retaliation of those denied a meaningful remedy, as well as the increased insecurity resulting from a generalized cynicism toward rule of law norms that is likely to be exacerbated by the perceived impunity of this country's government and the total abdication of its courts. These costs are the foreseeable price of impunity. After all, the U.S. government's actions toward Japanese Peruvians violated numerous international laws, some violations rising even to the status of the very same war crimes for which it participated in the Allied prosecutions of Nazi and Japanese war criminals during the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Such violations cry for redress or retaliation.
 

The message is as simple as it is clear: American national security depends on justice, both domestically and internationally. The U.S. will never be secure until it does justice, within and beyond its borders.⁽⁵³⁾ It is the lack of justice that makes national security depend on the consolidation of imperial power just as certainly as the guilt of the victimizer makes the victim a constant threat, whether real or imagined. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Rather than building a stable peace based on the pursuit of justice, national security doublespeak is an instrument for legitimating repression. In its totalitarian logic, national security ideology makes the rule of law routinely give way to the conjuring of enemies, while unilateral aggression becomes preemptive self-defense.⁽⁵⁵⁾ And though race is certainly a central feature of the conjured enemy, national security ideology makes an enemy of anyone who resists the dominant structure of privilege and power.⁽⁵⁶⁾ The ensuing violations of basic civil rights and otherwise fundamental legal norms are then justified through a totalitarian logic in which the struggle for social justice and political change is recoded and attributed to "subversive elements" whose subversiveness constitutes a threat so overwhelming it cannot be stopped unless basic rights are suspended or fundamental legal norms violated. Thus, national security ideology is hardwired for repression rather than for justice, and as such it is part of the problem, not the solution.
 

The important point is that, by centering national security ideology, LatCrit and APACrit Theory are particularly well positioned to develop a penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the way white supremacist power is il/legally structured, both domestically and internationally. Even a cursory review of Latina/o histories would quickly reveal the centrality of national security ideology in legitimating repression throughout the Americas. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ From the dirty wars of South America, to the "low intensity conflicts" waged throughout Central America on a bankroll of U.S. taxpayer dollars and illegal earnings, ⁽⁵⁸⁾ to the embargo of Cuba, to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the bombing and subsequent desertion of the Cambodian people, the subordination of Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Americans is easily mapped around the national security doublespeak of American foreign policy.
 

At the same time, no critical analysis of the role of national security doublespeak in the reproduction of white supremacy would be complete, if it did not track this ideology's domestic deployment. In the United States, the government has orchestrated campaigns of disinformation and subversion against a wide assortment of domestic political movements, from the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, to its campaigns of surveillance, infiltration and persecution of the Sanctuary Movement, the Pastors for Peace, CISPES. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ In different ways, across different sociolegal contexts, national security doublespeak has been visibly present and circulating in the repression of domestic resistance movements aligned against perceived social and racial injustices and unlawful foreign policies. Tracking this ideology through its various appearances would certainly provide a valuable comparative perspective from which to reveal and assess the extent to which state criminality is implicated in the reproduction of white supremacy, through the systematic repression of many different groups, as well as revealing the role of national security rhetoric in legitimating these crimes and their cover-up. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Thus, by tracking the circulation of national security doublespeak in both legal and political discourse, LatCrit and APACrit would again be positioned to reveal otherwise suppressed inter-group commonalities organized around and against the unlawful deployment of state coercive power, both domestically and internationally.

A third theme ripe for further APACrit and LatCrit analysis is the centrality of political economy in fostering the consolidation of white supremacy. ⁽⁶¹⁾ More specifically, this is a call for sustained analysis of the way regimes of law/lessness organize the struggle for material accumulation and economic power and promote the reproduction of white supremacist class hierarchies, both domestically and transnationally. Viewed through a materialist critical perspective, the Internment orders directed at Japanese American and Latin Americans are just another example of a long line of historical instances in which racial/ethnic hostility has been activated to achieve the material and economic dispossession of a successful minority for the benefit of a resentful and envious majority. Indeed, Professor Saito's recounting of the economic achievements of the Japanese Peruvians and the hostility targeted specifically at these achievements by the Hispanic majority in Peru, evokes other instances where race hate has been mobilized to legitimate the transfer of material wealth from a non-white minority/majority to a white identified majority/minority: the Nazi extermination of the Jews was orchestrated, after all, around the massive plunder of their wealth; throughout the Americas, the plantation economy was (and in someways still is) an economic machine fed on the exploitation of enslaved Africans for the enrichment of a white-identified transnational elite; both Native and Mexican Americans were robbed of their lands and its wealth for the benefit of white settlers whose westward expansion and ultimate dominance were cast as manifest destiny.
 

It is worth noting, initially, that the narrative line linking these stories across the disjunctures of space and time, is an act in two parts: it is the story of the way the lust for economic dominance and material accumulation insinuates itself into the articulation of white supremacy, even as white supremacy takes center stage in the project of legitimating the economic dispossession and elimination of non-white peoples. The implications of this narrative linkage are profound and far-reaching precisely because so much ink has been spilled in abstract debates about the relative priority of race and class in the subordination and/or assimilation of non-white peoples. ⁽⁶²⁾ Viewed against the backdrop and impasses of this race/class debate, the biggest pay-off of any collective and self-conscious effort to articulate an anti-essentialist, anti-subordination agenda somewhere in/between LatCrit and APACrit Theory and beyond the Black/White paradigm would be to shatter the grip of these theoretical abstractions on the legal imagination.
 

The questions pending for LatCrit and APACrit Theory reach far beyond the parameters of the race/class debate and map the analysis of political economy around the concrete particularities and multiple dimensions of our similarities and differences. Abstract debates must give way to the search for analytical methodologies and political strategies that will enable us (1) to understand the activation of racial difference as a strategy of dispossession across the multiple global/local configurations of economic power and structures of production and accumulation; (2) to understand, conversely, the structural dimensions and institutional frameworks of economic power/lessness as well as the extent of material dispossession and its impact across different racial and ethnic communities, both within and beyond the United States; (3) to resist the reproduction of class hierarchies within and between our distinct, but overlapping and intersectional, communities; and (4) to identify new ways of deploying law and new sites for doctrinal deconstruction and reform intervention that can counter the material dispossession of non-white peoples across the globe. These objectives constitute fundamental imperatives and represent, at minimum, a call to replace abstract categories of race and class with a comparative analysis of the particularities that historically constructed and today challenge the distinct identity positions we have inherited and/or embrace; it is a call to assess the structures of commonality and difference that may be thereby revealed -- in light of our common and self-conscious commitment to an anti-essentialist, anti-subordination imperative -- and to translate these new insights into a project of coalitional activism, legal interventions and substantive reform. ⁽⁶³⁾
 

Put differently, the convergence of white supremacy and the struggle for material accumulation in the production of racial/ethnic subordination needs to be traced through the different regimes of il/legality that have come to bear on different communities in different sociolegal contexts. Tracking the convergence of class and racial privilege across these different contexts is important because solidarity within and between non-white groups depends, at least at this stage in the ethical development of our communities, on a shared recognition of the similarities at the core of our differences. Thus, the centrality of political economy, like national security ideology and international relations reflects a move to focus more concretely and particularly on the way white supremacy has been reproduced in different communities through similar/different regimes of il/legality, across both historical time and inter/national space.
 

To be sure, a move to center international relations, national security ideology and political economy as central themes in and between LatCrit Theory and APACrit scholarship is a move beyond the Black/White paradigm, but it is not a move that excludes Black subordination from the critical enterprise. Perhaps ironically, understanding the truth of this assertion requires a major and fundamental reconceptualization of "the center" of Black identity in Critical Race Theory. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Indeed, last summer at LatCrit III, I tried to make this point explicit by organizing and moderating a focus group discussion aimed intentionally and self-consciously at analyzing the particularities of Black subordination by, for example, foregrounding issues arising from and related to the transnational dimensions of Black identity within and between different Latina/o and Caribbean communities. The purpose of this focus group session was two-fold: its performative purpose was to center Black subordination in LatCrit discourse long enough to make it clear that the production of LatCrit theory must not only theorize, but must also operationalize, its anti-essentialist aspirations with concrete measures and, furthermore, that these measures may, from time to time, require decentering the HispanicLat, precisely in order to expand the Crit; its substantive purpose was to explore intra-Black commonalities and differences, both within and beyond the United States, and to examine whether and how the Black/White paradigm suppresses critical analysis of the stratifications within and between different Black communities. ⁽⁶⁵⁾
 

Viewed from this perspective, the three common themes I emphasize for LatCrit and APACrit scholarship are of central importance to many, indeed most, of the Black peoples of the world and, therefore, would correctly be at the center of a new stage in the evolution of Critical Race Theory.⁽⁶⁶⁾ This would, however, be a new stage for Critical Race Theory precisely because the effort to reveal and resist these processes of subordination, in and among various and varied Black communities, moves beyond, not within, the parameters of the Black/White paradigm. It makes this move by recognizing that the subordination of peoples of color is effectuated by multiple processes, that these processes construct relations of privilege and subordination both within and between all minority groups, including within and between different Black identity groups, and that understanding and transforming these inter and intra minority group hierarchies requires the configuration and activation of new political alliances beyond the racial and ethnic essentialism of our inherited forms of identity politics.
 

III. Reflections on Method: From Critical Histories to the Discursive and Ontological Deconstruction of White Supremacist Regimes of Il/Legality
 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about reading these two articles in tandem is the way their very different methodologies converge on the same "bottom line." Both Professors Saito and Gott argue that any long term solutions to the problems reflected by the Internments of Japanese Americans and Latin Americans are to be found in the further development of international law, whether through the domestic incorporation and enforcement of international norms, through the development of international institutions with effective enforcement powers, or through a deconstruction of the essentialist assumptions that inform the disjunctures of domestic and international regimes. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ They arrive at these common conclusions, however, by very different routes, deploying very different theoretical methodologies and emphasizing very different aspects of the problems generated by the United States' impunity, and the legal structures that enable it.
 

In this final Part, I want to reflect on the broader significance of the different critical methodologies Professors Saito and Gott have so brilliantly employed. Section A identifies the key moves Professor Saito makes in her account of the Japanese Latin American Internment and discusses their more general applicability in developing an anti-essentialist, anti-subordination project in and between LatCrit and APACrit theory. Section B explores the significance of Professor Gott's critical methodology to my current and ongoing efforts to conceptualize the parameters of the emerging, but as yet undelimited, field of International Criminal Law. In both sections, my objective is to foreground their methodological contributions to the continued evolution of critical race theory in legal scholarship.
 

• Critical Historical Analysis as Anti-Essentialist Anti-Subordination Method

 

At an abstract level, Saito's first move is not new. In fact, the move to center the legal problems and lived realities of marginalized and intersectional identities has a rich tradition in the evolution of critical legal theory precisely because it is an effective way of revealing otherwise invisible forms of oppression, structural violence, as well as the limitations of legal remedies and formal remedial categories. Even so, the move from abstract generalities to particularized analysis is complex and difficult; not every one makes the move, nor makes it effectively; however, this move is absolutely crucial to the continued evolution of critical legal theory, and it is from this perspective that Saito's work stands as positive example.
 

Take, for instance, the Japanese Latin Americans Professor Saito foregrounds in her analysis. They have, until now, been completely invisible - not just in the dominant narratives of American national identity, nor just in the discourses that produced the Civil Liberties Act of 1998 reparations for Japanese Americans, nor just in the LatCrit debates over intra-Latina/o sameness and difference -- but in all the relevant discourses. Her decision to analyze the legal question of reparations by focusing on their particular situation makes evident, by example, the need for critical legal theory to move from abstract and generalized calls for anti-essentialist critiques to their concrete and detailed performance. At the same time, her work, again by example, makes evident the profound and far-reaching challenges confronting any anti-subordination project that is genuinely grounded in the anti-essentialist commitments of the intersectionality critique: this is because there is always, as one discovers, another way, another place, to find "the bottom" of any particular context. If the story of the Japanese American Internment destablizes World War II master narratives of American righteousness, liberty and justice for all, the story of the Japanese Latin American exclusion from the 1998 reparations and the government's more recent efforts to settle the Mochizuki class action at a quarter of the damages paid to Japanese American internees ⁽⁶⁸⁾ illustrates why identity politics must be organized around a steadfast commitment to the values of anti-essentialism and anti-subordination and the further commitment to relentlessly seek out and assert the perspectives of the marginalized and intersectional identities at the bottom of any particular context.
 

Professor Saito's second move shows the value of historical analysis as anti-essentialist method. We cannot understand the broader significance of Japanese Latin American intersectionality without understanding the historical events that produced this particular identity group. By excavating this history, Saito reveals otherwise suppressed linkages between racial formation, the history of the international political economy and the sociolegal realities constituted by inter-state competition. Understanding the logic of white supremacy means understanding the configurations of the local/global political context, the structures of economic opportunity and the cultural norms and expectations that prompted the initial migrations from Japan to Peru and that later made Japanese Latin Americans particularly vulnerable to Peruvian and U.S. racism. Theirs is a history of U.S. racism degenerating into war crimes. The pay off for the telling is this: neither the meaning of WWII, nor of the struggle for domestic enforcement of international laws, remains the same.

The master narratives of American national identity are calculated to lull the comfortable into believing that our government elites are not war criminals, but rather leaders of the free world. This belief in the inherent superiority of the United States' form and practice of government is one explanation why the struggle for international human rights has developed so slowly in this country. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Indeed, without Saito's historical analysis, we might readily interpret the proposed settlement in the Michozuki case as evidence of U.S. commitment to international law and its readiness to remedy wrongs as required by a genuine commitment to the rule of law. Only by decentering the master narrative of U.S. righteousness and excavating the suppressed histories of these Japanese Latin Americans, is the settlement visible as insult added onto injury: not only is the harm hardly remedied, the wrong is in no way admitted.
 

Saito's third move is to link her analysis directly to a future-oriented law reform project. In this way, her analysis goes far beyond mere historical excavation of the wrongs suffered by the Japanese Latin Americans. She focuses on the here and now by taking up the challenge of imagining how law should be marshaled today and transformed for tomorrow in order to afford a meaningful legal remedy for these kinds of wrongs, and more particularly, for these specific people, now plaintiffs in the Michozuki class action. She reviews their various legal claims under domestic U.S. law, assesses their likely outcome in light of prior judicial interpretations of applicable legal doctrines, and then proceeds to lay out in clear, concrete and comprehensive detail, the legal arguments that might most effectively be used to establish the requisite legal bases for moving the case into each of the various international forums she identifies and assesses. Indeed, her text reads, at times, like a lawyer's brief precisely because her objective and great accomplishment is to produce a work product that is directly relevant to the ongoing legal struggle being waged today on behalf of this particular group, even as it links their particular case to a growing and increasingly universal struggle for human rights and against impunity. Her thorough analysis and creative legal arguments stand as positive example of the way critical legal theory can be directly relevant to the process of social transformation through law.

In sum, Saito's intervention is a path-breaking moment for launching a joint project in and between LatCrit Theory and APACrit Scholarship. These two movements in critical legal theory, share parallel and intersecting projects that should be consciously identified and collaboratively pursued. Since its inception, the LatCrit movement has developed the practice of annual conferences with published proceedings in an intentional effort to "[t]ransform the production of legal scholarship from an experience of intellectual isolation into a practice of collective engagement and empowerment." ⁽⁷⁰⁾ A moment's reflection would quickly generate an increasing number of issues that would certainly benefit from the production of collaborative analyses in and between LatCrit and APACrit scholarship. ⁽⁷¹⁾ A collaborative project to explore these issues from an anti-subordination perspective would certainly be one way to transform the production of scholarship into a politically relevant and transformative practice. ⁽⁷²⁾

• Reconstructing the Rule of Law By Deconstructing the Role of National Security Ideology in the Production of Structural Violence

To say that International Criminal Law constitutes a field is surely premature. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ It is rather an imagined domain, whose conceptual parameters, substantive norms, procedures and institutional arrangements are fragmented across the multiple decentralized sites of an inter-state system that has only recently taken meaningful steps towards establishing an International Criminal Court with international jurisdiction. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ In its absence, the field of "International Criminal Law" is really a four-faced hybrid: one face reflects the regime of ad-hoc war crimes tribunals created on the strength of the Security Council's authority to maintain international peace; ⁽⁷⁶⁾ the second face reflects the intersection of international norms and domestic legal process as, for example, in the multilateral suppression conventions, that codify the vast majority of so-called "international" crimes, but depend on domestic criminalization and enforcement by state parties to these conventions; ⁽⁷⁷⁾ the third face reflects the intersection of domestic norms and international legal processes as, for example, in the regimes of cooperation established through Extradition, Transfer of Prisoners and/or Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs); its fourth, and perhaps most controversial, face is reflected in the unilateral extraterritorial projection and enforcement of domestic criminal laws by dominant states. ⁽⁷⁸⁾
 

The pending question for LatCrit and APACrit Theory is how the development of international criminal law, along any of these four trajectories, is likely to impact anti-subordination values and agendas. While the answer is hardly self-evident, as it would require a relatively sophisticated comparison of relatively embryonic regimes, Professor Gott's analytical framework does provide a revealing point of departure for such comparisons. Since the internationalization of criminal justice is likely to reconfigure and perhaps eventually eliminate the line between the internal/external realms, the relevant question is how any particular reform tends to move this imaginary line: does the domestic absorb the international or the international absorb the domestic? do current reforms along any of these four trajectories tend to consolidate the rule of law in the international realm or diminish the rule of law in the domestic? Unpacking the different ways in which a transnational and intersectional identities might answer these questions in any particular instance would enable LatCrit and APACrit scholars to develop meaningful comparisons of the way these different trajectories for the field of international criminal law are likely to reconfigure the internal/external dichotomy and, therefore, their comparative implications for any anti-subordination project that depends, at least in part, on the expectation that state power must be subject to the rule of law.⁽⁷⁹⁾ A few examples should illustrate the point.
 

Take, for instance, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [AEDPA].⁽⁸⁰⁾ This statute was passed ostensibly "to commemorate" the tragic deaths caused by the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. ⁽⁸¹⁾ The national security threat posed by international terrorism was the claimed justification for a broad sweeping statute that aggressively expands the parameters of unreviewable state power, even as it simultaneously contracts the due process protections previously afforded individual interests in liberty, security and freedom from arbitrary and retaliatory state action. The statute, among other things, suspends judicial review of deportation orders entered against non-citizens convicted of an expanded class of crimes and requires mandatory detention of people facing deportation for a criminal conviction. ⁽⁸²⁾ It establishes special "removal courts" with ex-parte proceedings enabling the government to present classified national security secrets to support deportation of alleged terrorists, while denying the accused any opportunity to discover and, therefore, to rebut the contents of such communications. It contracts significant First Amendment rights of association by prohibiting individuals from providing financial support to organizations certified as "terrorist organizations" and unreasonably restricts the opportunity to challenge such designation.⁽⁸³⁾ It also contracts the accessibility of federal habeas corpus to death row prisoners and asserts extraterritorial jurisdiction over a wide range of conduct committed outside the United States.
 

Certainly, the AEDPA illustrates one model for the internationalization of criminal law and enforcement. In this model, the field of international criminal law will increasingly be defined by the extraterritorial assertion of U.S. criminal jurisdiction and by the police and/or military practices developed to enforce the extraterritoriality of federal criminal laws. Viewed through Gott's analytical framework, however, AEDPA gives reason to doubt whether the world will be a safer, saner, more just place, if the development of this field is entrusted to the United States Congress. Gott's approach instructs us to examine how AEDPA's provisions structure state power and accountability across the imagined dichotomy of the internal/external realms. The answer is clear. The statute's provisions contract the scope of due process protections guaranteed to individuals within the United States by discursively positioning its new special terrorist removal courts, expedited deportation hearings, ex parte proceedings and suspension of judicial review in the external realm: the people processed through these procedures are not insiders. They are terrorists and criminal aliens, foreigners whose very presence within the United States becomes the vehicle through which national security ideology legitimates the domestic expansion of state power and contraction of individual rights as a necessary response to the foreign penetration of the domestic realm. Never mind that the "spill over" effects of expanded state power and contracted constitutional rights may eventually overrun the domestic.
 

Conversely, rather than attempting to resolve the problem of international lawlessness by designing reforms that will strengthen rule of law normativities in and through the development of an effective and impartial international criminal justice system, AEDPA invokes the rhetoric of national security to support its "findings" that the President "should use all necessary means, including covert action and military force, to disrupt, dismantle and destroy international infrastructure used by international terrorists, including overseas terrorist training facilities and safe havens." ⁽⁸⁴⁾ In this way, AEDPA reconstitutes the international as a realm of power politics and state impunity, a construction reflected as well in the denial of extraterritorial application to fundamental constitutional norms, such as the 4^th Amendment's prohibitions against warrantless searches and government abductions, that would presumably be applicable to state actions performed within the United States. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ According to AEDPA's national security rhetoric, not only must the internal foreign threat be exposed and expelled through expedited, ex parte and unreviewable procedures, the threat must be tracked to its origins and eliminated by any means necessary. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ Never mind that the Oklahoma City bombing AEDPA was meant to "commemorate" was not the work of foreign terrorists, but of a small group of right-wing criminals, born to the privileges of their U.S. citizenship; never mind also that the threat of international terrorist attacks in the United States is more a useful fiction than a verified fact.⁽⁸⁷⁾
 

If AEDPA offers one view into the way the field of international criminal law may evolve, the U.S. War on Drugs offers another. Rather than pursuing substantive international consensus and interstate cooperation through multilateral suppression conventions, the United States has pursued a policy of promoting the "harmonization" of domestic criminal law regimes through unilateral economic coercion. To this end, it has leveraged its foreign assistance programs to secure major changes in the drug enforcement policies, criminal justice procedures and institutional arrangements of countries throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Many of the "reforms" prescribed for foreign aid recipients would be of doubtful constitutionality within the United States, as for example, requirements that these governments deploy their military personnel in domestic enforcement operations.⁽⁸⁸⁾
 

Again, the justification for these seeming disjunctures between U.S. internal constitutional requirements and its external policies is that drug-trafficking is a national security threat. Missing from these narratives of domestic vulnerability to foreign orchestrated conspiracies to poison the heartland of America is any recognition, acknowledgment or effort to expose to legal accountability the government elites, who have substantially facilitated the growth of international drug trafficking through their collaborations with, protection of and assistance to known drug traffickers involved in this government's "anti-communist" crusades throughout Central American and elsewhere in Asia and Latin America.⁽⁸⁹⁾ From this perspective, the destructive impact of the War on Drugs on constitutional rights within the United States⁽⁹⁰⁾ can now be seen as a direct consequence of the impunity with which the government pursues its "national security interests," by any means necessary.
 

These examples leave no doubt that Professor Gott's internal/external metaphor provides a particularly compelling way of understanding the significance of recent federal anti-terrorist legislation, the regimes of extra-territorial il/legality through which the United States is projecting its War on Drugs throughout the Americas, and the relentless assault on fundamental domestic civil liberties accompanying both its anti-terrorist and drug-trafficking initiatives. ⁽⁹¹⁾ While reassertions of the internal/external dichotomy may successfully disguise the totalitarian function of national security ideology in any particular sociolegal context, the deconstruction of this dichotomy across different legal domains will enable us see structural and systemic interconnections in the way power is being re/configured and, therefore, will better position us to assess the cumulative impact and implications of national security ideology for any anti-subordination project that depends, at least in part, upon ensuring the legal accountability of government elites.
 

Finally, the interventions by Professors Saito and Gott provide a welcome opportunity to reflect on a more general question about the relevance of critical legal scholarship to the project of social transformation. The relevance of Saito's work is self-evident and immediate; it is a kind of legal analysis that produces, and gives a scholar's authority to, new and untested legal arguments that can then be used to advance the legal interests of particular groups in specific law suits. Professor Gott's work, by contrast, offers a kind of legal analysis that is unlikely to be immediately applicable in any particular litigation struggle because it is in effect a deconstructive attack on the fundamental assumptions and conceptual frameworks that are used to rationalize the decisions reflected in legal doctrine. Though very different, both kinds of analysis are crucially important to ensuring that anti-subordination legal scholarship retains its critical edge and political integrity because each kind of analysis has something different to offer the project of social transformation through law: creative legal advocacy promotes social transformation by finding new ways to redeploy existing laws in existing forums informed by a realistic assessment of the limitations of substantive legal doctrine; the deconstructive critical analysis of law, by contrast, reminds us of the many ways in which the struggle through law, can distract us from the even more fundamental struggle over law -- over the assumptions it embraces and deploys, the misrepresentations it affirms, the impunity it disguises, and the power/lessness it creates and allocates among different groups in different sociolegal contexts. Deconstructive analysis, is in short, not so much a call for social transformation through law as it is a call for the transformation of law. These two excellent articles show why anti-subordination legal scholarship needs both kinds of analysis.

1. Professor of Law and Co-Director, Center for Hispanic and Caribbean Legal Studies, University of Miami School of Law. This essay is based on comments made at the Fifth Annual Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty. Boston College Law School, October 1-3, 1998. Special thanks to Sumi Cho for inviting me to participate in this wonderful conference.

2. Natsu Saito, Justice Held Hostage: U.S. Disregard for International Law in the WWII Internment of Japanese Peruvians - A Case Study ** Boston College L. Rev. **; ** Boston College Third World L. Rev. ** [hereinafter Justice Held Hostage]; Gil Gott, A Tale of New Precedents: The Internment and Post-War Foreign Affairs/National Security Law ** Boston College **; ** Boston College Third World L. Rev. ** [hereinafter A Tale of New Precedents].

3. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) (establishing a strict scrutiny standard for review of racial classifications and upholding the race-based internment of Japanese-Americans under that standard).

4. Compare Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 235, 274 (1995) (opinion of Ginsberg, J.) (A Korematsu-type classification ... will never again survive scrutiny ... however, the lead opinion has dispelled the notion that "strict scrutiny" is "fatal in fact.") with Reggie Oh & Frank Wu, The Evolution of Race in The Law: The Supreme Court Moves From Approving Internment of Japanese Americans to Disapproving Affirmative Action For African Americans, 1 Mich. J. Race & l. 165 (1996); 4 Asian L.J. 198 (abstract 1997) (expressing doubt that strict scrutiny will prevent a Korematsu redux, even as the authors persuasively challenge the idea that any meaningful affirmative action can survive "strict scrutiny" given the way the court tends to apply it).

5. The Military and the State in Latin America (Just War rhetoric organized around account of the nature of communism as antichrist, anti-liberty); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (SR Books, 1984) (torture and disappearances were not perpetrated against persons, but rather against "subversives;" subversives were not just political opponents, but sub-human allies of the antichrist).

6. See e.g. Elizabeth M. Iglesias & Francisco Valdes, Afterword: Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Race and Class in Coalitional Theory: A Critical and Self-Critical Analysis of LatCrit Social Justice Agendas, 19 U.C.L.A. Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 503, 539 (1998) [hereinafter Afterword: Coalitional Theory] (discussing persecution of the Sanctuary Movement under Reagan Administration).

7. This work is impressive on numerous levels, quantity, quality, diversity of perspectives, see e.g., Symposium: Citizenship and its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination (Part I), 76 Oregon L. Rev. 207 (1997); Symposium: Citizenship and its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination (Part II), 76 Oregon L. Rev. 457 (1997); Keith Aoki, Colloquy: The Scholarship of Reconstruction and the Politics of Backlash, 81 Iowa L. Rev. 1467 (1996) (introducing colloquy).

8. LatCrit scholarship has virtually exploded in the last three years. See e.g. Symposium, LatCrit Theory, Latinas/os and the Law, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1087 (1997), 10 La Raza L. J. 1 (1998); Colloquium, Representing Latina/o Communities: Critical Race Theory and Practice, 9 La Raza L. J.S 1 (1996); Symposium, LatCrit Theory: Naming and Launching a New Discourse of Critical Legal Scholarship, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 1 (1997); Symposium, International Law, Human Rights and LatCrit Theory, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 1 (1997); Symposium, Difference, Solidarity and Law: Building Latina/o Communities Through LatCrit Theory, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1998); Symposium, LatCrit III, *** U. Miami L. Rev *** and *** U. Texas Hispanic L. J. *** (forthcoming, 1999). This work includes contributions by numerous APACrit scholars. For a particularly insightful overview of the purposes and commitments of the LatCrit movement, see Francisco Valdes, Under Construction: LatCrit Consciousness, Community and Theory, 85 Cal. L. Rev. 1087, 93-96 (1997), 10 La Raza 1, 7-10 (1998).

9. These three themes focus on the centrality of (1) international law and relations, (2) national security ideology and (3) political economy in the articulation of an anti-essentialist, anti-subordination critical legal intervention in/between LatCrit and APACrit and beyond the Black/White paradigm, as discussed more fully infra Part II.

10. Erik K. Yamamoto, Re-Thinking Alliances: Agency, Responsibility and Interracial Justice, 3 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L. J. 33; Erik K. Yamamoto, Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering Practice in Post-Civil Rights American, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 821 (1997); Iglesias & Valdes, Coalitional Theory, supra n. *** at ***

11. Ediberto Román, Common Ground: Perspectives on Latino-Latina Diversity, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 483 (1997) (urging Latinas/os to focus on our similarities rather than our differences as a way of promoting intra-group justice and solidarity); George Martinez, African-Americans, Latinos, and the Construction of Race: Toward an Epistemic Coalition 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 213 (1998) (making similar argument urging Latinas/os to seek our commonalities with African-Americans).

12. Professor Saito's analysis of the legal precedents invoked in upholding the indefinite detention of Haitian asylum seekers provides an excellent example of the power and value of seeking our commonalities in the systemic and structural dimensions of law. Not only does Professor Saito's analysis link the Haitian detentions to the plenary power over immigration first established in the Supreme Court's Chinese Exclusion cases, Saito, Justice Held Hostage, supra n. 2 at n. 280, her analysis of the discursive interconnections between the opinions in Jean v. Nelson, 727 F.2d 957 (11^th Cir. 1984) (upholding detention of Haitian asylum seeker) and Fernandez-Roque v. Smith, 734 F.2d 576, 582 (11^th Cir. 1984) (upholding detention of Cubans) also reveals the very real costs of our failures to see ourselves in each others' oppression. The indefinite detention of the Cubans is, after all, an unsurprising application of the authority affirmed in Jean v. Nelson.

13. The suppression and/or denial of difference is a common strategy used by dominant elites to dismiss the claims of subordinated subgroups within any particular context. By contrast, the commitment to the reintegration of difference through the dynamic transformation of a particular context is a central element in the achievement of intergroup justice and coalitional solidarity. See Elizabeth M. Iglesias, The Inter-Subjectivity of Objective Justice: A Theory and Praxis for Constructing LatCrit Coalitions, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 467 (1997) (rejecting notion that the proliferation of political identities should be suppressed for the sake of "the common good"); Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Structures of Subordination: Women of Color at the Intersection of Title VII and the NLRA. Not!, 28 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 395, 475-78 (1993) (neither objective truth, nor objective justice can be achieved without the redistribution of effective power to and among "the Other") [hereinafter Structures of Subordination].

14. See Iglesias & Valdes, Afterword: Coalitional Theory at 557 (urging LatCrit scholars to "avoid the essentialist tendency to seek universal truths in generalities and abstractions, [and instead seek] universal liberation in and through the material ... transformation of the particular and the contingent").

15. Eric K. Yamamoto, Introductory Comments (opening the conference proceedings and recounting Mr. Koramatsu's message to the conference). I fully agree with this exhortation: to remember the past is not enough to prevent its repetition. Too often people repeat what they remember if only because it is familiar or habitual. To prevent repetition of the past, we have also to imagine the future -- both as we want it to be and as it is likely to become if we do not take affirmative action to alter the present, as we live it.

16. See Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Foreword: International Law, Human Rights and LatCrit Theory, 28 U. Miami Inter-American L. Rev. 177, 179(1996-97) (identifying legal spaces where current conflicts over the jurisprudential relationship between international and domestic legal regimes will increasingly become a central concern of LatCrit Theory).

17. In the Black/White paradigm, the analysis of white supremacy is truncated by a tendency to view the problem of racial subordination exclusively in terms of, or primarily as the result of, racial discrimination by whites against blacks. See Juan Perea, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought, 85 Cal. L. Rev.1213, 10 La Raza L. J. 127 (1998). Of course, resistance to the Black/White paradigm predates the emergence of both LatCrit and APACrit scholarship, most notably in the work of Critical Race Feminists. See e.g. Critical Race Feminism, Adrien K. Wing, ed. (Temple U. Press, 1997). In fact, my earliest encounters with the Black/White paradigm were in my efforts to articulate the implications of taking "women of color" seriously as a distinctly interracial political identity that minority women might embrace as a common point of reference for revealing, resisting and organizing interracial solidarity against the particular forms of oppression minority women suffer - oppressions rendered invisible in different ways by a Black/White paradigm in which "all women are white," "all Blacks are men" and "all minorities are Black." See Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra n. ** at 400-3, 492-7.

18. See e.g. Symposiums, supra n. 7 & 8.

19. See Iglesias & Valdes, Afterword: Coalitional Theory, supra n. ** at 562-74 (urging LatCrit scholars to remain cognizant and vigilant lest in rejecting the Black/White paradigm, we uncritically equate Black and White positions within a paradigm that emerged from the very real and continued oppression of whites over Blacks, as well as by non-Blacks who have sought their own liberation in the delusions of a white identity); Chris K. Iijima, The Era of We-construction: Reclaiming The Politics of Asian Pacificamerican Identity And Reflections on The Critique of The Black/White Paradigm 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 47, 50 (1997) (warning that moves "beyond the Black/White paradigm" may be coopted by racist status quo "unless racial identity continues to be a conscious and explicit rejection of white supremacist ideology manifesting through specific political positions.")

20. See eg Kevin Johnson, Some Thoughts on the Future of Latino Legal Scholarship, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 101 (1997); see also Elizabeth M. Iglesias, International Economic Law and Human Rights Enforcement: Locating Latinas/os in the Linkage Debate, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 361(1996-97) (critical assessment of current debates over whether and how to link human rights enforcement to international economic law is exceedingly complex given that Latinas/os are divided by differing degrees of cultural assimilation, by nationalist ideologies as well as by race, class and gender hierarchies) [hereinafter International Economic Law]

21. See e.g. Symposium, LatCrit Theory: Naming and Launching a New Discourse of Critical Legal Scholarship, supra n. 8 (intra-Latina/o diversities and commonalities central theme in all five panels and at least two of the three featured articles at LatCrit I); Symposium, Difference, Solidarity and Law, supra n. 8 (intra-Latina/o stratifications again a central theme at LatCrit II).

22. See e.g. Iglesias & Valdes, Afterword: Coalitional Theory, supra n. * at 574-583 (suggesting how an anti-essentialist anti-subordination analysis of class and economic marginalization might be articulated in LatCrit Theory through attention to the particularities of distinct Latina/o communities).

23. Saito, pin cite

24. The history and current status, for example, of the Philippines and of Filipinas/os would be a particularly interesting point of reference for exploring intersections in and between LatCrit and APACrit critical theory. Not only do the Philippines share substantial commonalities with Cuba and Puerto Rico as former Spanish colonies; all three also share historical interconnections as a result of U.S. colonial pretentions after the Spanish-American War. See e.g. Michael H. Hunt Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy 46-91 (Yale U. Press, 1987).

25. See e.g. infra, n. 32-35 and accompanying text. (existential crises generated by transnational identities as particularly central in Latinas/os and Asian Pacific American lived experiences).

26. See Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra n. ** at 492-97 (defending controversial position that respect for individual autonomy must take precedence over articulations of "the common good" by linking the existential crises imposed on women of color to the uni-linear political agendas of competing group elites; put differently, an existential critique of intersectionality makes respect for individual autonomy a fundamental ethical imperative -- even where liberal theory fails).

27. Cf. A. Sivananda, All That Melts into Air Is Solid: the Hokum of New Times, Race & Class, 31(3), (1989) (trashing what he calls the proliferation of positional politics).

28. See e.g. Iglesias, International Economic Law, supra n. 20 at 377-86 (illustrating how competing representations of Latina/o subordination in the discourses of development, dependency and neo-liberalism project very different configurations of Latina/o interests, thereby politically activating different Latina/o subject positions and promoting different inter and intra-group alliances -- with profound implications for the project of promoting the incorporation of human rights norms in international economic law).

29. LatCrit Theory has worked hard to emphasize the multiplicity and intersectionality of Latina/o political identity and to explore its anti-subordination implications, for example, at LatCrit II, by featuring a plenary panel devoted specifically to issues central to Indigenous Latinas/os, see e.g. Iglesias & Valdes, Afterword: Coalitional Theory, supra n. ** at 568, n. 167; Luz Guerra, LatCrit y la Des-colonización Nuestra: Taking Colón Out, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 351 (1998) and, at LatCrit III, by featuring a focus group session on "BlackCrit Theory" see infra n. ** and accompanying text (describing original purpose of BlackCrit focus group session at LatCrit III). This effort has charted an admittedly difficult, but crucial, path that will probably prove to be the most significant element in ensuring that LatCrit Theory remains true to its original commitment to an anti-subordination anti-essentialism, as both political objective and critical method.

30. These commonalities are in addition to our already widely recognized common interests in resisting the imposition of English only and racist immigration regimes, as well as related issues like the coercive apparatus and contracted political rights structured around the citizen/alien dichotomy or, for example, the fact that Asian Pacific Americans, like many Latinas/os, get coded as aliens because of our race, ethnicity or related attributes such as accents. For a pathbreaking analysis on the racialization of accents see Mari J. Matsuda, Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence For The Last Reconstruction, 100 Yale L.J. 1329 (1991)

31. The centrality of the international to LatCrit Theory is reflected in the recent volume entitled Symposium, International Law, Human Rights and Latcrit Theory, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. (1996-97).

32. See Celina Romany, Claiming a Global Identity, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am L. Rev. 215 (1996-97); Enid Trucios-Haynes, LatCrit Theory and International Civil and Political Rights: The Role of Transnational Identity and Migration, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 293 (1996-97); Margaret E. Montoya, Mascaras, Trenzas, Y Grenas: Un/masking the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories And Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women's L.J. 185 (1994); Margaret E. Montoya, Lines of Demarcation in a Town Called Frontera: a Review of John Sayles' Movie Lone Star, 27 N.M. L. Rev. 223 (1997); Berta Hernandez-Truyol, Borders (En)gendered: Normativities, Latinas, And a Latcrit Paradigm, 72 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 882 (1997)

33. Keith Aoki, Critical Legal Studies, Asian Americans in U.S. Law & Culture, Neil Gotanda, and Me, 4 Asian L. J. 19, 22-3 (1997).

34. Both LatCrit and APACrit scholars have done particularly valuable and insightful work deconstructing the conflation of race and "foreignness." See e.g. Neil Gotanda, Asian American Rights and the "Miss Saigon Syndrome," in Asian Americans and the Supreme Court: A Documentary History 1088, 1096 (Hyung-chan Kim ed., 1992); Natsu Taylor Saito, Model Minority, Yellow Peril: Functions of "Foreignness" in the Construction of Asian American Legal Identity, 4 Asian L. J. 71, 77-81(1997) (exploring the "racing" of Asian Americans as Foreign); Kevin Johnson, Some Thoughts on the Future of Latino Legal Scholarship, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 101, 117-29 (treatment of Latinas/os as foreigners and its implications for Latina/o anti-subordination struggles).

35. Pin cite

36. Pin cite Interestingly, limited confidence in the impartiality of national courts has already produced, in other contexts, an increasing use of international dispute resolution panels with expanded subject matter jurisdiction, direct domestic effect and adjudicative finality. See G. Richard Shell, Trade Legalism and International Relations Theory: An Analysis of the World Trade Organization, 44 Duke L.J. 829 (1995) (analyzing these dispute resolution alternatives as evidence of an increasing departure from the 'regime management model" of international relations to an "efficient market model" of international trade legalism). The question viewed in this light is simply whether the vindication of human rights will ever be given the same priority in international law as the property and contract rights of international business interests.

37. Pin cite; Gott, A Tale of New Precedents, supra n. ** at [dft p.6] (discussing domestic/foreign dichotomy as construed in "realist" theories of international relations).

38. Pin cite Id. [dft p.27] (showing how the domestic/international dichotomy in constitutional jurisprudence enables "liberal" legal interpretation to constitute the state as ontologically prior to the law -- meaning that national elites are above "the rule of law" at least with respect to their external escapades and their suppression of internal rebellion).

39. See e.g. infra (war on drugs, war on terrorism); see also Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement at 272-81 (South End Press, 1988) (efforts to delegitimate AIM by linking it to foreign dominated communist conspiracy); Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos 27, 38 (1988) (doubts about Mexican-American loyalty to Mexico and later to Spain used to promote border militarization and the dispossession and repression of Mexican-American citizens, during and after the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars).

40. See e.g. Acuña, Occupied America, Id. at 40 (1988) (the impunity with which the in/famous Texas Rangers tortured and murdered Mexican-Americans legitimated on the grounds that "affairs of the border cannot be judged by standards that hold elsewhere.")

41. Some notable exceptions include Henry J. Richardson, III, "Failed States," Self-Determination, and Preventive Diplomacy: Colonialist Nostalgia and Democratic Expectations, 10 Temple Int & Comp. L. J. 1 (1996); Isabelle R. Gunning, Arrogant Perception, World Traveling, and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, Adrien K. Wing, ed. (1997); Hope Lewis, Lionheart Gals Facing the Dragon: The Human Rights of Inter/national Black Women in the United States, 76 Oregon L. Rev. 567 (1997). It is also significant that Martin Luther King and Malcom X were assassinated just as they were moving toward an internationalist and class based concept of liberation struggle. See Natsu Taylor Saito, Beyond Civil Rights: Considering "Third Generation" International Human Rights in the United States, 28 U. Miami Inter-Am. L. Rev. 387, 404-5 (1996-97).

42. See e.g. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, supra n. *** at 46-91 (recounting how Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Native Americans, African Americans, and Filipinos have been positioned within the American ideology of racial hierarchy and the way the racialized representations of these various groups were used to legitimate military interventions and the occupations of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines) Cf. Iglesias, International Economic Law, supra n. 20 (illustrating why LatCrit anti-subordination analysis must incorporate, but also must move beyond, any theoretical framework that reduces Latina/o subordination to a function of the inter-state dependency relations centered in and by dependency discourses).

43. See e.g. Paula C. Johnson, The Social Construction of Identity in Criminal Cases: Cinema Verite And The Pedagogy of Vincent Chin, 1 Mich. J. Race & L. 347, 388 (1996) (linking race hate crime to american male working class anxiety over the impact of Asian economic competition on American jobs); INS retaliatory detentions of Colombian citizens entering U.S. during U.S.-Colombian fall out over drug war; discriminatory representations of Arabs as terrorists

44. See Iglesias, Foreword, supra n. 15

45. Pin cite, Gott, at [dft p. 6 (noting that "the domestic internment of a racially defined group of citizens and residents may seem out of place in the foreign affairs context).

46. For example, this move deconstructs the Curtiss-Wright versus Youngstown debate over the respective roles of the President and Congress in the conduct of foreign affairs by suggesting that this debate actually constitutes "one side of a broader dialectic" in which the real question is from where does either branch (or both together) get "the power to act imperiously" in the context of foreign affairs. Id. at [dft p.35 ]

47. Id. See infra n. ** and accompanying text (What do the DEA's activities in Mexico have in common with the U.S. embargo of Cuba?).

48. See e.g. Inner-City Violence: The U.S. Military Tries to Prepare for Urban Warfare Scientific American, September 1998 (reporting that U.S. Marines have traveled to Chicago "to get a better feel for what battle could be like in a real city").

49. Id. at [dft p. 35, fn 100)

50. Internal inter-group divisions over the purposes and legitimacy of U.S. participation in the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and II, like more recent conflicts over the nature, extent and legitimacy of asserted national security interests in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Vietnam, Cambodia and more recently, in the Gulf War, all raise substantial questions about what constitutes "the American national interest" once we reject the white supremacist logic that collapses the national interest into the interest of national elites, and acknowledge the equal validity of minority interests in the national security calculus. For a particularly insightful and path-breaking foray into this uncharted area of pending critical analysis See Henry J. Richardson III, Gulf Crisis and African-American Interests under International Law 87 Am. J. Int'l L. 42 (1993)

51. To say that the national interest is that determined by political representatives is to elevate form over substance with a vengeance, particularly given the legal structure of voting rights and campaign finance.

52. Natsu Saito, Justice Held Hostage, supra n. ** at

53. See e.g. Iglesias, Structures of Subordination, supra n. * (thematizing the profound implications of the common saying "No Justice, No Peace," but arguing further that the commitment to justice is necessarily a commitment also to the redistribution of institutional power on the premise that if there is no peace without justice, neither is there likely to be justice without power: "No Justice, No Peace; No Power, No Justice").

54. Pin cite, Saito (recounting reasoning in which the acknowledged mistreatment of Japanese Americans by white Americans is used to explain why their loyalty in question); For an exploration of the broader theoretical implications following from the basic insight that the will to dominate is both the cause and effect of profound insecurity, see Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Rape, Race and Representation: The Power of Discourse, Discourses of Power and the Reconstruction of Heterosexuality, 49 Vand. L. Rev. 869, 953 (arguing that feminist theory must begin to disaggregate its problematic conflation of "power" and "dominance;" pornographic masculinity, like "big stick" diplomacy, offers only the delusion of power, since "[t]he will to dominate means a constant anxiety and insecurity over the inability to dominate.").

55. As in the U.S. defense before the ICJ in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors.

56. While many of the grossest human rights violations in Latin America can be effectively addressed through the category of race (for example the genocide of Guatemalan Indians), many others cannot. The dirty wars in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil targeted individuals not so much because of their racial identities (Hispanic Latinas/os are not minorities in Latin America) but rather because of their political identities. In the genocidal logic of these regimes, race was replaced by "subversive" -- a fact that makes international criminal law instruments like the Genocide Convention of limited use in combating the mass persecution and extermination of real and putative groups in Latin America. See eg, Beth Van Schaack, The Crime of Political Genocide: Repairing The Genocide Convention's Blind Spot, 106 Yale L.J. 2259 (1997).

57. The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America eds. Brian Loveman & Thomas M. Davies, Jr. (U. Nebraska Pres, 1989).

58. See Frank J. Smist, Jr. Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 2^nd Ed, 1947-1994 (U. Tenn Press, 1994) at 264-5 (reporting that "Iran-Contra investigators unearthed plans to use the profits from secret U.S. arms sales to Iran to perpetuate a self-sustaining, overseas organization that would run future covert operations) [note to editor: this is a new cite, not included in my first revision]

59. See e.g. Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization Home Page, <http://www.igc.org/ifco/ifco.html> Long History, <http://www.igc.org/ifco/fuhis.html> (documenting Pastors for Peace projects and history of federal government persecution); Susan Bibler Courtin, The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement 131-49 (Westview Press 1993) (recounting federal surveillance and prosecution of Sanctuary movement); Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press, 1988) pp. 370-6 (recounting FBI activities against CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of EL Salvador); Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement ( South End Press, 1991).

60. See Churchill & Vander Wall, Agents of Repression at 272-81 (efforts to delegitimate AIM by linking it to foreign dominated communist conspiracy)

61. See e.g. Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Global Markets, Racial Spaces and the Role of Critical Race Theory in the Struggle for Community Control of Investments: An Institutional Class Analysis, in Critical Race Theory, supra, n. ** at ** (forthcoming 1999) (illustrating the centrality of political economy to the production of "racial spaces" and developing an "institutional class analysis of law" as a framework through which to see the operation of law and legal doctrine in constructing the relations of power/lessness that sustain the racial spaces of the political economy, both domestically and internationally).

62. See e.g. Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations eds. John Rex and David Mason (Cambridge U. Press, 1986) (assortment of essays on class and race in comparative race and race relations analysis); Baron, Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism: A Theory of Nationalism and Divisions in the Labor Market, pp. 187-209 in Piore, Segmented Labor Markets (racism is a social formation with an economic base).

63. See e.g. Iglesias & Valdes, Coalitional Theory, supra n. * at 574-82 (mapping the historical and regional particularities reflected in the diversity among Latina/o communities and linking these differences to the fact that subordination and poverty within these communities have been constituted through very different legal events and institutional arrangements) . This approach could easily be extended, through LatCrit and APACrit collaboration, as for example, by a comparative analysis of the way racial ideologies and legal instruments of the alien land laws were used to dispossess Asian Pacific Americans even as Mexican-Americans were dispossessed of their land titles by U.S. courts in violation of international treaty commitments to Mexico and therefore in direct violation of international law. Compare e.g. Keith Aoki, No Right to Own: Rethinking the Early Twentieth Century Alien Land Laws, (cite contribution to this symposium) with Guadalupe T. Luna, Zoo Island: LatCrit Theory, Don Pepe and Señora Peralta, 19 UCLA Chicano-Latino L. Rev. ** (1998). This type of comparative critical and particularized analysis promises valuable insight into the different legal methodologies through which white supremacy has reproduced itself through history, thereby directly combating the tendency to frame inter-group differences among non-white communities in competitive, rather than coextensive, terms.

64. This is ironic because so much of the LatCrit/RaceCrit discussion has focused on decentering Black identity to make way for non-Black others in Critical Race Theory. See e.g. Francisco Valdes, Latina/o Ethnicities, Critical Race Theory & Post-Identity Politics in Postmodern Legal Culture: From Practices to Possibilities, 9 La Raza L. J. 1, 5-7 (1996); Elvia R. Arriola, Foreword: March!, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1, 26-7 (1998). By contrast, understanding my point here requires understanding how LatCrit Theory also constitutes a call to decenter the estadounidense national cultural identity in order make room for the particularities of transnational and intersectional Black identities in both LatCrit Theory and CRT.

65. The title of the focus group discussion was From Critical Race Theory to LatCrit to BlackCrit? Exploring Critical Race Theory Beyond and Within the Black/White Paradigm. See Iglesias, Foreword: LatCrit III, ** U. Miami L. Rev. **; ** U. Texas Hispanic L. J. ** (forthcoming, Spring 1999). The point was to explore critically the impact of the Black/White paradigm on Black people, particularly its tendency to suppress recognition of intra-Black antagonisms and inter-racial solidarities that might otherwise emerge around issues of gender (ala Critical Race Feminism), as well as around the more marginalized issues of imperialism, colonialism, national origin identities, language rights, and immigration status. To my great surprise, an enormous amount of tension and confusion developed in the mistaken expectation that the purpose of this discussion was to revisit the question of Black exceptionalism or separatism. This was not my purpose. On the contrary, the implications of the discussion I wanted to see would have radically altered the terms of any separatist debate by making the relevant question, not whether "Blacks" should pursue separatism, but rather which "Blacks" should separate with whom given the competing claims of multiple identity communities on any particular Black individual and, in particular, the claims of Latina/o identity on Black Latinas/os. Only a few people got the point. Indeed, this effort to learn about intra-Black particularities by centering and comparing the different histories, perspectives, politics and transnational identities of Black Latinas/os and Caribbeans almost entirely failed. It did, however, generate a valuable exchange on the historical interconnections and future relationships between Critical Race Theory and LatCrit Theory. It also generated enough energy and interest to warrant another try at LatCrit IV, which will feature a plenary on The Meaning and Particularities of Blackness in Latina/o Identities and LatCrit Theory.

66. See e.g. Globalization and Survival in the Black Diaspora: The New Urban Challenge, ed. Charles Green (SUNY Press, 1997); Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (Africa World Press, 1987). While some of this work is already being done by a network of international law scholars, who are loosely organized around the New Approaches to International Law "NAIL" and the Third World Approaches to International Law "TWAIL" Conferences, and whose general project is to promote the articulation of CLS perspectives and methodologies in the fields of International and Comparative Law, there has been very little cross-fertilization between Nail/Twail and CRT scholars. Through their calls to center the international in Critical Race Theory, LatCrit Theory and APACrit scholarship may provide the bridge that enables this necessary exchange to develop a more prominent position in anti-subordination scholarship. This is precisely the intention behind the Panel discussion entitled Mapping Intersections Between Critical Race Theory and International Law that Professor Gott and I have organized for the American Society of International Law Meeting in March 1999. Promoting and producing critical scholarship at the intersections of Nail/Twail and CRT is exactly the kind of work to be done as a joint project in/between LatCrit Theory and APACrit scholarship.

67. Saito, pin cite ; Gott, supra n. * at [dft p.88].

68. Saito, pin cite: the Mochizuki v. United States settlement offered each internee $5,000 as opposed to the $20,000 offered each Japanese American internee under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. (Dft p. 5)

69. See Saito, Beyond Civil Rights, supra n. ** at 411 (noting popular belief that the superiority of U.S. constitutional and civil rights regimes makes domestic enforcement of international human rights unnecessary).

70. Iglesias, Foreword, supran n. * at 179.

71. See e.g. Robert S. Chang, Racial Cross-Dressing, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev.423 (1997) (noting different historical trajectories that produced intersectional Asian/Latina/o identities). This would include issues bearing on the relationship between Asian Pacific American and Latinas/o communities, issues particularly relevant to the intersectional identities that tend to be marginalized by both communities, as well as comparative analysis of the way white supremacist normativities operate across our communities, see eg. Berta Hernández-Truyol, Building Bridges III - Personal Narratives, Incoherent Paradigms, and Plural Citizens, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 303, 327 (1998) (observing how "model minority" category operates in parallel ways to divide both Asians and Cubans, in particular, from other Latinas/os and Blacks).

72. Sumi Cho, Essential Politics, 2 Harv. Latino L. Rev.433 (1997). Note that the Korematsu conference was made possible by Sumi's activist commitment - the grant.

73. See supra n. ** and accompanying text (section on national security).

74. See e.g. Bassiouni's book (the only published casebook of teaching materials for a law school course on International Criminal Law); See also, Elizabeth M. Iglesias, International Criminal Law (unpublished original course materials on file with author).

75. See cite to Statute of International Criminal Court [this summer]

76. Michael P. Scharf, The Politics of Establishing an International Criminal Court Duke J. Comp. & Int'l L 167 (1995) (noting limitations of ad hoc tribunals).

77. See e.g. Rupa Bhattacharyya, Establishing a Rule-of-law International Criminal Justice System, 31 Tex. Int'l L.J. 57, 68-69 (1996) ("suppression conventions" do not operate through international criminalization but rather by promoting domestic criminalization in areas of international concern. "Thus, narco-trafficking, terrorism, trafficking in obscenity and prostitution, money laundering, counterfeiting, theft of art and archeological treasures, and torture have all been the subject of so-called "suppression conventions.").

78. See e.g. Brandon S. Chabner, The Omnibus Diplomatic Security And Antiterrorism Act of 1986: Prescribing And Enforcing United States Law Against Terrorist Violence Overseas, 37 UCLA L. Rev. 985 (1990) (U.S. should project its prescriptive and enforcement jurisdiction extraterritorially).

79. Like Professor Gott, I am mindful of the indeterminacy of the "rule of law" formulation and use it here only to reference basic substantive and procedural norms like due process and equal protection. While these norms are subject to interpretation, the point is that they are relevant points of reference only when power is subject to "the rule of law."

80. Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104- 132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996); Roberta Smith, America Tries to Come to Terms With Terrorism: The United States Anti-terrorism And Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 v. British Anti-terrorism Law And International Response, 5 Cardozo J. Int'l & Comp. l. 249 (1997).

81. Remarks of Senator Hatch (R-UT), 142 Cong. Rec. S3352-01 (daily ed. April 16, 1996) (urging Senate passage "in commemoration of the lives of those who died last year (in the Oklahoma City explosion)."

82. The statute has resulted in deportation orders that shock the conscience. See e.g. Nancy Morawetz, Rethinking Retroactive Deportation Laws and the Due Process Clause, N.Y. U. L. Rev. 97 (1998) (discussing cases).

83. [Sec. 219 Designation of Foreign Terrorist Organizations] See e.g. Robert Plotkin, First Amendment Challenges to The Membership And Advocacy Provisions of The Antiterrorism And Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, 10 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 623 (1996).

84. [sec. 324: Findings

85. See e.g. Alvarez-Machain (extraterritorial abduction did not bar prosecution of abducted individual); United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 110 S.Ct. 1056 (1989) (4^th Amendment inapplicable to warrantless search of Mexican national's residence by DEA agents in Mexico). To be sure, recent assaults on the 4^th Amendment render the "presumable" increasingly uncertain.

86. The relentless invocation of national security provides ever thinner cover for the criminal acts through which this country's elites have chosen to pursue their peculiar vision of national security. First, the destruction of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan will undoubtedly go down in history as further evidence of the complete lawlessness, impunity, ignorance and disregard for human life with which this country chooses to "secure" its interests. See Sheryl McCarthy, High Crimes? What About Sudan Bombing? Newsday, 09-24-1998, pp A58. Second, No Justice, No Peace.

87. See e.g. David B. Kopel & Joseph Olson, Preventing a Reign of Terror: Civil Liberties Implications of Terrorism Legislation, 21 Okla. City U. L. Rev. 247 (1996)

[text over FNS 25-9](1996) (FBI reports only two international terrorist incidents in the U.S. in the last 11 years: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a demonstration "sit-in" at Iranian Mission in the UN by Iranian dissidents) [hereinafter Reign of Terror].

88. See e.g. Sandy R. Murphy, Drug Diplomacy and the Supply Side Strategy: A Survey of United States Practice, 43 Vanderbilt L. Rev. 1259 (1990) [hereinafter Drug Diplomacy]; Arthur Berney, Cocaine Prohibition: Drug Induced Madness in the Western Hempisphere, 15 B.C. Third World L. J. 19 (1995) [hereinafter Cocaine Prohibition].

Both authors note that the U.S. aid-leveraged conditionalities require Latin American governments to implement drug enforcement measures that undermine democratic possibilities, both by empowering the most reactionary factions in the government and military and by delegitimating elected political leaders, who are viewed as puppets of a foreign power, rather than as representatives of the people's interests or the nation's constitutional values.

89. See e.g. Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (1991); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in The Global Drug Trade (1991)

90. See e.g. john a. powell & Eileen B. Hershenov, Hostage to the Drug War: The National Purse, The Constitution and the Black Community, 24 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 557 (1991); See also David Rudovsky, The Impact of The War on Drugs on Procedural Fairness And Racial Equality, 1994 U.Chi.Legal Forum 237, 250-51 (1994) (citing report that 70% of the motorists stopped by the Sheriff's drug squad in Volusia, Florida were Black or Hispanic; 80% of the cars searched were driven by Blacks or Hispanics; only 1% of those stopped received traffic citation; and over 500 motorists were subjected to searches and frisks without cause. By comparison, only 5% of the drivers on this stretch of Interstate 95 were black and Hispanic.).

91. See e.g. Kopel & Olson, Preventing a Reign of Terror, supra n. * at ** ; Berney, Cocaine Prohibition, supra n. ** at **