Deviance, Resistance, and Love

Regina Austin's article, "A Nation of Thieves". Securing Black People's Right to Shop and to Sell in White America, along with her other recent works on the Black community's deviants and outlaws, points in a promising direction for progressive legal scholars. The scholarly treatment of deviance and the Black community could center on two inquiries. First, how does the dominant society define Black people as outlaws and use that status to justify its violence against us?

Second, how does or should the Black community regard those who are defined as outlaws? Much of recent progressive legal scholarship has focused on the first inquiry. Even the work of critical race scholars tends to take the perspective of outsiders to critique the dominant mindset--"first seeing, then addressing, defects in the culture in which all of us, including the outsider, are immersed."