The Hermeneutic of Acceptance and the Discourse of the Grotesque, With a Classroom Excercise on Vichy Law

As a nonspecialist on the laws of slavery, I can best contribute to this discourse by suggesting some reflection on the comparative nature of racial discrimination in constitutionally based and seemingly enlightened legal systems. To the American system under close scrutiny in this Symposium, my recently completed work on Vichy law may lend some degree of further understanding. For the legalized persecution of Jews in France during the period 1940- 44 stands as a classic twentieth-century example of what I believe to have been at work in antebellum America: the elaboration through traditional patterns of legal reasoning of a discourse of exclusion that rationalized the vicious persecution of some while still maintaining ostensible norms of constitutional decency towards most others. I call this reasoning process the "hermeneutic of acceptance," and its result-in pre-Civil War America and in postarmistice France-was the creation by lawyers and judges trained to believe in certain essential legal decencies, of analogous discourses of the grotesque, of patterns of words politely and pragmatically designed to preserve the dignity of the law at the same time as they inflicted or abided the law's selective violence upon racial minorities.