Racial Justice Speaker Series with Professor Cheryl Wade

This week, the UC Davis School of Law Racial Justice Speaker Series continued with Cheryl Wade, Harold F. McNiece Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law.

Professor Wade’s talk was entitled “Privilege and Exploitation: Racial Injustice and the Corporate Person.” Professor Wade teaches issues of Race, Gender and Law, Business Organizations, Corporate Governance and Accountability, and Race and Business. Her book, Predatory Lending and The Destruction of the African American Dream was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2020.   

Race is an integral part of corporate law and governance, but discourse in this context focuses almost exclusively, and implicitly, on whiteness. What would happen if corporate leaders acknowledged that almost all of the most powerful players in business are white? What if business leaders genuinely explored the reasons why so few Black and Brown people lead public corporations? This kind of acknowledgment and exploration would uncover systems and structures that privilege white Americans while impeding the upward mobility of BIPOC communities, families and individuals. Corporations are bastions of power, privilege and exploitation and the empty rhetoric of the 2020 corporate antiracism statements in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder will not mitigate the harm imposed by corporate activity on people of color.

Created in response to the tragic killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others and the widespread protests that followed, UC Davis Law’s Racial Justice Speaker Series is now in its second year. Reaffirming the law school’s longtime commitment to racial justice, the series invites leading scholars from around the country to explore systemic racism as it pertains to all communities of color and areas of law.  The goals are to inform, enlighten, and - most important - engage in meaningful conversation with our King Hall community and the larger public.