I. LAW AS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

II. THE DUTY OF FAIR REPRESENTATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF TITLE VII AND THE NLRA

A. Defining the Context: Steele v. Louisville & N.R.R.

B. The Duty of Fair Representation: Channeling Agency and Allocating Institutional Power: Toward a First Understanding of Structural Violence

    1. The Duty of Fair Representation in the Integration of Segregated Union Locals.
    2. The Duty of Fair Representation and Section 7 Rights of Concerted Activity

        (a)     The Appeals Court Decision: A Unified Labor Policy
        (b)     The Supreme Court's Decision: The Fragmentation of Doctrinal Domains.
        (c)      Modeling the Regimes, Considering the Consequences

C. The Duty of Fair Representation: the Structures of Inclusion and Exclusion: Toward a Second Understanding of Structural Violence

    1. The Duty of Fair Representation in Board Certifications of Discriminatory Unions (Compulsory Inclusion).
    2. The Duty of Fair Representation in Appropriate Bargaining Unit Determinations (Permissible Exclusion).

D. Structural Closure: Substantive Fictions and Representational Structures.

    1. The Duty of Fair Representation as Legal Fiction.
    2. Representational Structures and the Color of Representational Power

III. TRANSFORMING THE STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE OF LAW

A. Structural Violence: Causes and Cures?

    1. Structural Violence and the Illusion of Objectivity

        (a)     The Ideology of "Objectivity" and The Institutional Structures of Subjective Power
        (b)     The Intersubjectivity of Equals: Moral Imperative and Institutional Blue Print

    2. Toward Self-Representational Structures

B. Individual Autonomy, Collective Political Identities, and the Pre-conditions for a Genuine Solidarity: A View from Below.

    1. Of Individual Autonomy, Multiple Consciousness and the Dream of a Centered Self.
    2. Of Solidarity, Subordination and the Limits of Colorblind Collectivism

I. LAW AS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

"Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death." ⁽²⁾ Thus begins a remarkable essay, in which Robert Cover admonished legal scholars to mark the difference between legal interpretation and literary theory and remember the violence which is law. Taking issue with the characterization of law as a system of meanings, ⁽³⁾ a culture of argument, or "a normative universe . . . held together by . . . interpretative commitments," ⁽⁴⁾ Professor Cover insisted that legal scholars never forget that legal meanings are articulated in the context of an organized practice of violence. According to Cover, "[t]here is a radical dichotomy between the social organization of law as power and the organization of law as meaning." ⁽⁵⁾ And while law is most certainly a system of meanings, "the 'significance' or meaning that is achieved [in legal discourse] must be experienced or understood in vastly different ways depending upon whether one suffers that violence or not." In a more recent article, ⁽⁶⁾ Anthony Alfieri draws on Professor Cover's work to articulate a notion of "interpretative violence," the silencing and suppression effected by lawyers who ignore their clients' stories, plugging client problems into the pre-existing conceptual slots of legal precedent and thereby obstructing the transformative potential of client experiences and self-understandings.

Taken on their own terms, these two accounts of the violence of law, though valuable and important, neglect the extent to which legal interpretation defines the scope of authority and allocates effective power among different social interests ⁽⁷⁾ in the many institutional arrangements through which current structures and practices of subordination are repeatedly challenged and cumulatively reconstituted. ⁽⁸⁾ These accounts suggest that law could be rendered a more effective vehicle of social transformation or, alternatively, a less effective instrument of oppression through sensitivity training and the elaboration of more compelling appeals to the empathy and altruistic sentiment of judges and lawyers. ⁽⁹⁾ In approaching the relationship between law and the social reality of economic and political subordination, these accounts focus our attention on the communicative relationship between judges and litigants and the interpretative relationship between judges and the legal materials they deploy, rather than on the way legal interpretation structures the relations of authority and power in across the many institutional contexts that converge in the construction of concrete social reality and the regulation of daily life. By doing so, both accounts suggest that race and gender subordination can be overcome without radically altering the current distribution of power throughout all the institutional arrangements which constitute our social reality.

The increasing concern to hear the voices and respect the perspectives of the oppressed represents a progressive development in legal scholarship; ⁽¹⁰⁾ however, when promoted as a strategy for achieving substantial social change, this approach promises more than it can realistically deliver precisely to the extent its proponents ignore the more fundamental question of institutional power -- that is, the distribution of power which determines who must be persuaded to listen to whom. By constrast, in this Article, I wish to explore the relationship between law and the social reality of subordination by introducing and distinguishing another modality of the violence of law, a modality I identify as "structural violence." "Structural violence" is a term I draw from liberation theology. ⁽¹¹⁾ In that discipline, the term refers, among other things, to a situation in which the dominant systems of a society, whether that be its legal, political or economic institutions, suppress the avenues of internal transformation and repress the agency of those whom the society subordinates and exploits. ⁽¹²⁾

The critique implicit in the concept of structural violence entails a commitment to structural justice, defined here as a commitment to the evolution of institutional arrangements in which relations of domination can be effectively transformed through the agency of those whom the society subordinates. In the theology of liberation, this commitment is expressed as "a preferential option for the poor," a conscious choice to view the world and its processes from a perspective that affirms the fundamental and inviolable sanctity and agency of those persons whom the world's processes most devalue and oppress. ⁽¹³⁾ The adoption of this perspective is not, primarily, an act of solidarity with "the other" so much as an affirmation of the interdependency and fundamental equality of all human persons in the mind of God, nor is this "preferential option" an end in itself -- a stopping point at which we can ultimately arrive. ⁽¹⁴⁾ It is, rather, a first step in the ever more demanding commitment to actively reconstruct the relations of power through which human persons are devalued and oppressed. Thus, rather than attempting to develop more satisfying accounts of "the requirements" (or more often "the non-requirements") of justice or more compelling appeals to the empathy of the powerful, this "preferential option" locates the attainment of objective justice in the material empowerment of the oppressed. ⁽¹⁵⁾ In this Article, I invoke the concept of structural violence as a vehicle for understanding the ways in which legal interpretation constructs institutional power and the way the organization of institutional power obstructs our liberation from the relations of oppression that are constituted through the socially constructed categories of race and gender. ⁽¹⁶⁾ In other words, I use the concept of structural violence to focus attention on particular features of legal interpretation and the institutional context in which it is practiced, namely the practice of case by case adjudication, and to assess these features in terms of their impact both on the integrity of legal interpretation as well as on the practical alternatives available for women of color to act effectively as agents of self-determination and social transformation in and through the institutional and conceptual structures established by law.

The critique embedded in the concept of structural violence is a valuable point of departure for examining the relationship between law and the social reality of women of color, because it suggests that "the problem" in this relationship is not primarily in the fact that judges preside over a social structure in which their interpretative judgements are enforced through the coercive power of the state, ⁽¹⁷⁾ though indeed I will argue that the authority conferred through the interpretative practices of judges does play an important role in constituting the structural violence of law. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Nor is the problem simply that the interpretative practices of lawyers and judges suppress and render legally irrelevant the prespectives, life experiences and values of the individuals whose interests and claims they routinely determine, though this too plays a significant role. ⁽¹⁹⁾

As used in this Article, the concept of structural violence locates "the problem" in the relationship between the practices of legal interpretation, on the one hand, and the organization of institutional power, the regulation of collective agency and the aspiration toward objective justice on the other. If, as I argue, the structures erected through legal interpretation organize our social, political and economic alternatives in such a way that our transformative agency is systematically excluded from the system, then exploitation is institutionalized and violence is structural. Thus, law is established as a system of structural violence when it eliminates effective agency from the realm of the lawful. In this context, liberation depends on the assertion of unlawful agency, while social justice depends on the reconstruction of legal agency. ⁽²⁰⁾

At a superficial level, the legal regimes that regulate the American workplace, most specifically the NLRA and Title VII, appear to provide women of color with viable avenues for obtaining recourse and effecting change. The empathetic interpretation of particular legal issues in particular cases by particular judges also appears, at times, to have produced progressive results for women of color. Nevertheless, the thrust of my argument is that these avenues of agency and recourse are more apparent than real and, more importantly, that their limitations are often obscured precisely because legal interpretation is practiced in and operates through a strategic fragmentation of doctrinal and institutional domains. This fragmentation is, to some degree, inherent in the practice of case by case adjudication, but it has also been significantly exacerbated and strategically manipulated by judicial decisions, which consciously separate doctrinal and institutional domains in order to promote specific interests and policies, which have little to do with respecting the self-determination or empowering the transformative agency of women of color. ⁽²¹⁾

Thus, in a very real sense, the politics of interpretative fragmentation is based on the absence of women of color as a compelling reference point in the elaboration of boundaries and intersections between the different legal regimes that converge upon the concrete institutions and practices of the American workplace. The purpose of this Article is to foreground the woman of color -- just as liberation theology makes a normative commitment in its preferential option for the poor -- and to bring this reference point to bear in a sustained critique of the cumulative and interactive impact which the politics of interpretative fragmentation have had in regulating our agency and constructing our identities.

To define my project in this way is to invite assault on numerous fronts. Let me focus initially on the most immediate source of potential misunderstanding, namely, the implicit assertion that "women of color" constitute a distinct political subject and represent a meaningful perspective from which existing legal regimes may be examined and judged. ⁽²²⁾ Admittedly, the woman of color is a historically contingent, ⁽²³⁾ culturally embedded and politically contested subjectivity. Nevertheless, "women of color" represent the potential universality of a shared political identity, not because they constitute a homogenous group, but because, as a political construct, they represent a shared context of struggle which many women may be called to inhabit by their individual experiences at the intersection of multiple practices of oppression and identity formation. ⁽²⁴⁾ Women of color are appropriately entitled to demand legal agency within the institutional arrangements established by law. Instead, however, these institutions are legally constituted in ways that operate to suppress our agency and fragment our identities. My purpose, ultimately, is to illustrate, concretely and in some detail, how this is done at the boundaries of Title VII and the NLRA and furthermore, to suggest how this might be remedied by reconstructing the processes of collective identity formation and the redistribution of institutional power. ⁽²⁵⁾

Equally important, the perspective of women of color provides a particularly powerful vantage point for the project underway here. As I argue in this Article, law is maintained as a system of structural violence only because the fragmentation of doctrinal and institutional regimes obscures the analytic inconsistencies and bias as well as the cumulative and interactive impact which judicial interpretation of Title VII and the NLRA has had on the allocation of power in the concrete institutional arrangements through which social relations in the workplace are established and transformed. ⁽²⁶⁾ Adopting the perspective of women of color helps to overcome this blindness precisely because the liberation of women of color requires that we unify that which has been fragmented ⁽²⁷⁾ and fragment that which has been unified. ⁽²⁸⁾ Thus, while judicial practices may fragment the way we interpret Title VII and the NLRA, adopting the perspective of women of color brings these two regimes together as they operate interactively to regulate the workplaces we inhabit and provides a perspective from which their cumulative impact can be recognized as fundamentally unjust.

At some levels then, the methodology I adopt is really quite simple. Without attempting in this Article to provide a definitive account of what a woman of color "really" is, I proceed to examine the way that the institutional arrangements constructed through the legal interpretation at the boundaries of Title VII and the NLRA organize the formation of collective political identity and the exercise of institutionalized authority, focusing specifically on the impact these structures have on the agency of the women of color who have little alternative but to inhabit these arrangements. The following section illustrates this methodology by way of an institutional critique of the duty of fair representation of the NLRA. The purpose is to provide an alternative way of reading duty of fair representation cases and an alternative perspective for understanding the practical significance of this duty as the conceptual cement, which holds together the institutionalization of white/male power in concrete workplaces. This significance is most apparent when considered in the context of what I call "the politics of interpretative fragmentation," or rather the strategic boundary setting between regimes. ⁽²⁹⁾

1. This Article was edited and published in the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, Volume 28, 1993 pages 395-503. It should be of particular interest to labor and civil rights activists seeking to overcome the fragmentation of these two movements because it shows both how law institutionalizes structural barriers to such cooperation and suggests how these institutional structures might be reorganized. As I did in its initial publication, I dedicate this Article, with all my love, to my son, John Iglesias-Boothman, who taught me to say not.

2. Robert Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale L.J. 1601 (1986).

3. J.B. White, WHEN WORDS LOSE THEIR MEANING (1984) (characterizing law, not as a vehicle of social control, but as "a system of constitutive rhetoric" and citing the "culture of argument" as the standard for jurisprudential critique based on intelligibility of meanings invoked in legal decisions).

4. R. Dworkin, LAW's EMPIRE (1986) (characterizing law as a "normative universe . . . held together by . . . interpretative commitments).

5. Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale L.J. at 1602, n.2.

6. Anthony Alfieri, Reconstructive Poverty Law Practice: Learning Lessons from Client Narrative, 100 Yale L. J. 2107 (1991).

7. I speak of the allocation of power among interests, rather than individuals or groups in large part because, as a legal construction, power is best understood, not as something individuals have, but as resources and measures individuals are able to invoke because they represent specific social interests or occupy specific roles in specific institutional arrangements. Indeed, individuals rarely have power as individuals. One need only consider how individuals occupying high-level positions in any institution, whether public or private, quickly fall from power if they begin to deviate from the interests which maintain them in those positions. See e.g. Michael Morley, THE IMPERIAL STATE AND REVOLUTION (1987) pp.1-39

8. The arrangements with which I am primarily concerned in this Article are the procedures for collective organization in labor unions and the procedural structures available for enforcing Title VII. See infra

9. For a particularly fine example of this approach, see Marc Fajer, Can Two Real Men Eat Quiche Together? Storytelling, Gender-Role Stereotypes, and Legal Protection for Lesbians and Gay Men, 46 U. Miami L.Rev. 511 (1992).

10. See e.g. Alexander Aleinikoff, A Case for Race Consciousness, 91 Columbia L. Rev. 1060 (1991).

11. Jose Miranda, MARX AND THE BIBLE: A CRITIQUE OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF OPPRESSION (1974); Gustavo Guitierrez, LIBERATION THEOLOGY; THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE (1986); Dominique Barbe, GRACE AND POWER: BASE COMMUNITIES AND NON-VIOLENCE IN BRAZIL esp. pp. 70-3 (1987).

12. For a good explanation of the differences between subordination, domination, exploitation and oppression see Iris Marion Young, JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE (1990).

13. See Gustavo Gutierrez, THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE 8-11.

14. Id. at 12-13.

15. Some have said, "no justice, no peace," see e.g. Nicholas Wolterstorff, UNTIL JUSTICE AND PEACE EMBRACE (1983). Others have insisted, "no power, no justice," see e.g. James Cone, BLACK THEOLOGY & BLACK POWER; Reinhold Niebuhr, MORAL MAN, IMMORAL SOCIETY (justice best approximated when power is in equilibrium). I believe that both claims are correct and seek only to demonstrate the extent to which the structures of institutional power and legal agency maintained at the intersection Title VII and the NLRA are based on the assumption that there can be peace without justice and justice without power. See infra esp Part II B and D1.

16. Because I use the concept of social construction for different purposes, some introductory remarks may be helpful. I start with the proposition that the broadest group with which we all identify is humanity. As individuals, we experience our own humanity and identify as humans in response to that experience. The extent to which we identify with any subgroup of this broadest group called humanity is a direct result of the extent to which the treatment we receive is based on some quality other than our humanity. See Martha Mahoney, Law and Racial Geography: Public Housing and the Economy in New Orleans, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 1251, 1265, [hereinafter, Race and Geography] quoting Peter Jackson The Idea of 'Race' and the Geography of Racism, in RACE and RACISM: ESSAYS IN SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY, at 6 ("We begin by recognizing that 'race' is fundamentally a social construction rather than a natural division of humankind.")

For example, individual women identify with other women as women (rather than as human beings) as a direct result of the way we are treated as individuals because we are women. In other words, as individuals we identify as women, not because we are women but because, being women, we are treated in ways that only women are, for the most part, treated. Even physical and reproductive differences do not, in and of themselves, determine an individual's "essential identity," for one could easily imagine that in a world in which relations of power were organized around the physical feature of height, individuals might be more likely to identify themselves as short or tall, rather than as men or women. The fact that we are, in this world, categorized as women through our reproductive differences from men, does not mean that these differences would define our identity in a world where being men or women made little difference. Thus, group identity is developed as a result of and/or in affirmative resistance to the practices which allocate resources and opportunities across rigid socially constructed categories --categories, by which individual consciousness is ascribed an external identity and accorded a concrete position in society.

In short, the social construction of groups occurs through the practices by which individuals are classified and their access to opportunities and resources are socially organized. For women of color, whose individual self-consciousness is developed at the intersection of multiple practices of oppression and resistance, the difference between socially constructed group identity and individual self-consciousness is palpable and often painfully debilitating. Both the practices through which groups are constructed externally (namely, the racist, sexist and capitalist practices of dominant social actors) and maintained internally (namely, the practices through which internal elites suppress differences and maintain group cohesiveness around their self-privileging agendas) fragment our consciousness of our individual reality and assault our ability to act self-consciously in the world.

17. See Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale L. J. 1601 (1986). The power deployed by institutional actors in response to judicial interpretations is not limited to the power of the state. On the contrary, judicial decisions routinely allocate power across competing groups and interests that inhabit the institutions of our society. See infra.

18. See infra section on Emporium Capwell, ILA and Handy Andy Bell Howell.

19. See Marc Fager, Can Two Real Men Eat Quishe Together?, supra n. ***; Tony Alfieri, Reconstructive Poverty Law, supra n. **; Mari Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations, 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. 323 (1987).

20. As Steve Schnably suggests in Beyond Griswold: Foucauldian and Republican Approaches to Privacy, 23 Conn. L.Rev. 861 (1991), we need to rethink the dichotomy of power and powerlessness. The concept of "powerlessness" may simply hide the fact that law legitimates some exercises of power and deligitimates and punishes others. Neither black workers, nor women workers (of any race) are powerless, we are simply prohibited from exercising our power and denied the protection of law when we do. See Emporium Capwell, discussed infra. Thus, I want to note, at the outset, that in claiming that interpretative practices at the boundaries of Title VII and the NLRA operate to maintain a system of structural violence, I do not mean to say either that resistance is impossible or that favorable judgments have never been rendered. Such a claim would be absurd, for then court opinions favoring racial subgroups and, indeed, Title VII itself would be impossible to explain. On the contrary, the point, I aim to demonstrate, quite concretely, is that these interpretative practices have erected a structure which systematically restricts the pace and direction of social change by denying subordinated subgroups the legal authority to act as agents -- through the suppression of our collective identities and the strategic regulation of representational authority. Thus, my point is really that while resistance is possible, when truly effective, it is most often illegal, and while progress also is possible through law, the progress obtained in one legal context is often undermined by legal rules articulated in another context. Nikki Giovanni has implored us to remember (and I do) that resistance is always possible: "We've got to live in the real world. If we don't like the world we're living in, change it. And if we can't change it, we change ourselves. We can do something." quoted in BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT (Collins 1990). The questions I address in this article go directly to the problem of knowing when we should change ourselves and when and how we should demand, instead, that the world change.

21. See e.g. Emporium Capwell v. Western Addition, 420 U.S. 50 (1975) (Title VII is irrelevant to the Board's interpretation of rights and duties established by the NLRA); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Federal Power Commission, 425 U.S. 662 (1976) (FCC lacks authority to promulgate rules prohibiting regulatees from engaging in employment practices prohibited by Title VII).

22. Chandra Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle" in THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM, 5-7 (C. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres eds. 1991) (challenging categories of analysis used to locate "Third World Women" embraced by development scholars as objective "indicators" of the status of Third World Women.) As Professor Mohanty observes: "A number of scholars in the U.S. have written about the inherently political definition of the term women of color. . . This is a term which designates a political constituency, not a biological or even sociological one . . . What seems to constitute "women of color" or "third world women" as a viable oppositional alliance is a common context of struggle rather than color or racial identifications. Similarly, it is third world women's oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality. Thus, it is the common context of struggles against specific exploitative structures and systems that determines our potential political alliances."

23. As Chandra Mohanty notes in her introduction, "few studies address questions of the social agency of women who are subjected to a number of levels of capitalist discipline. In other words, few studies have focused on women workers as subjects -- as agents who make choices, have a critical perspective of their own situations, and think and organize collectively against their oppressors." THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM 29 (1991).

24. Thus, while I understand the importance of resisting "essentialism" in all its modalities, see Angela Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 581 (1990), the importance of affirming the potential universality of an individual woman of color was recently made rather obvious to me. In an earlier draft of some of the thoughts in this article, I wrote in terms of "I" rather than in terms of the experience of "women of color." In doing so, I intended and believed I could successfully project my stream of consciousness as an invitation for others to see themselves in me -- as a universal at least in some locality. Upon circulating the draft, I repeatedly received comments that I might not want to be "so personal," the implication being that when I spoke of "I," it could only be me that I was speaking of. I reject that implication. At the same time, I recognize that it may be a long time before a woman of color can ever speak in terms of "I" without triggering the thought of "she," rather than of we, and even less of you, for in speaking of "I," I was inviting you to see yourself in me. We still have a long way to go.

25. See and Compare Lani Guinier, The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success, 89 Mich. L.Rev. 1077 (1991); Guinier, No Two Seats, 77 Va. L.Rev. 1413 (1991); Eileen Silverstein, Union Decisions on Collective Bargaining Goals: A Proposal for Interest Group Participation, 77 Mich. L.Rev. 1485 (1979); Schatzki, Majority Rule, Exclusive Representation, and the Interests of Individual Workers: Should Exclusivity be Abolished?, 123 U. Penn. L. Rev. 919 (1975) Discussed infra n. *** and accompanying text.

26. See generally, J.M. Balkin, Ideology as Constraint, discussed infra n. *** and accompanying text.

27. That is, more specifically, the individual and collective identity of the woman of color as it is constituted by and situated within the network of legal regimes and doctrinal conceptions that regulate the workplace. See eg. Shoben, Compound Discrimination: The Interaction of Race and Sex in Employment Discrimination, 55 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 793 (1980); Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 U.Chi. Legal F. 139 (1989); Cathy Scarborough, Conceptualizing Black Women's Employment Experiences, 98 Yale L. J. 1457 (1989).

28. That is, more specifically, the legal rules theoretical commitments through which women of color have been submerged in broader collectivities. See bell hooks, FEMINIST THEORY from margin to center 43-65 (1984) (rejecting feminist vision of sisterhood grounded on suppressing the challenges raised by women of color against racism); Angela Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 Stan. L.Rev. 581 (1990).

29. Having said all this, I am somewhat amused, bemused and frankly amazed by the number of times I have been asked to justify the fact that I am "forcing" women of color into an analysis of legal doctrines, which, after all, are not "really" about women of color. Since I have dealt with this question throughout this Article in various contexts, at numerous levels and from multiple perspectives, it seems to me that the question is not really a question, but rather an expression of a pervasive commitment to preserving the interests which are currently privileged in the conceptual and institutional structures established by law -- the concern seems to be that if "women of color" must count as such, then everyone must count and then what would become of us? See e.g. Degraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Div., 413 F.Supp. 142, 144 (1976) (denying black women independent standing as Title VII plaintiffs on the ground that "[t]he prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box."). I admit that the prospect that one day the practices and structures of subordination may be rendered accountable to each and everyone who is thereby oppressed does not cause me much concern.

In a similar vein, I am somewhat perplexed by comments to the effect that my critique is as applicable to "people of color" as to women of color, the implication being that because most of the doctrines at issue are articulated in the context of race-based discrimination that my critique is not "really" about women. The point, of course, is that women of color are people of color and that consequently, structures of racial subordination, matter to us as women. Thus, from my perspective, these comments are simply efforts, whether intentional or inadvertent, to reconstitute the categories of political identity I am challenging in this Article.