M. Broderick Johnson (Yale Law School) has posted “Trying to Save the White Man's Soul”: Perpetually Convergent Interests and Racial Subjugation (Yale Law Journal, Vol. 133, No. 4, 2024) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
An assumption that dominates the discourse on race in the United States is that racial subjugation is only harmful to the subjugated. Many people take for granted that White people have nothing to gain from disrupting the existing racial hierarchy. Indeed, efforts to uplift people of color are typically viewed as coming at the expense of White people. This perspective is reflected in Derrick Bell’s influential interest-convergence thesis, which asserts that Black interests in racial equality are accommodated only if and when they converge with White interests. Because Bell accepted that White people did not have any inherent self-serving interest in racial equality, he believed that White and Black interests would only rarely and temporarily converge to bring about racial progress.
This Note challenges that paradigm. It offers a bold and novel adaptation and rehabilitation of the influential interest-convergence thesis by arguing that there are White interests, particularly in spiritual well-being and membership in a democratic society, which perpetually converge with Black interests in racial equality. Recognition of these perpetually convergent spiritual and democratic interests is necessary to undermine the notion that racial equality is a zero-sum game and to ultimately attain sustained and meaningful progress toward equality.
After establishing this theoretical framework, the Note explores the rich but thus far disappointing legacy of the perpetually convergent interests in various landmark race and education cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Grutter v. Bollinger, and, most recently, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA). In Brown, the Court failed to recognize how segregation harmed White students and, in doing so, both implicitly affirmed Black inferiority and canonized a zero-sum perspective of racial equality that has infected legal and public discourse. Grutter, on the other hand, was a rare instance in which the Court relied on White perpetually convergent interests and adopted an affirmative-action doctrine that recognized, though incompletely, how all people benefit from policies that mitigate or remedy racial subjugation. SFFA, as widely expected, marked the end of Grutter, but the Court’s rejection of the perpetually convergent interests in that case represents a more fundamental barrier to racial equality than many might realize.
In the wake of SFFA, it is important to recognize the perpetually convergent interests, both within and without the courts, if we are ever to make meaningful and sustained progress toward a more egalitarian society.
