From Fisher to Fisher: a critical race feminist counterstory about access to U.S. higher education

Abstract

Most education and legal scholarship overlook gendered-race themes in pre-Brown v. Board of Education desegregation higher education cases that remain relevant to examining post-Brown race-conscious admissions cases. The author engaged critical race feminism to create a counterstory with Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, a U.S. Supreme Court plaintiff in conversation with two fictitious Black women, Geneva Crenshaw, a civil rights attorney, and Nia Lytle, a tenure-track assistant professor of higher education. During a fictionalized one-day oral argument presented with dialogue composed from texts of actual race-conscious admission cases, the Black women react to and critique the societal and legal logic used by organizations and individuals who recruited the white women plaintiffs in those cases. The counterstory illustrates how civil rights discourse was coopted to advance white supremacist grievances. The conclusion calls on those invested in racial equity to reframe the discourse of institutional legal strategies to advance race-conscious admissions.

Keywords:

• Race-conscious admissions
• critical race feminism
• counterstory
• oral arguments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I adopt Cheryl Harris’s (1992) politically social identity stance of combining Black and woman/women as an emphasis of this inextricable unity. Further, this intentional coupling is a liberatory form of resistance against societal pressure to privilege one identity over the other.

2 Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was married at the time of her lawsuit. However, because she submitted her Langston University transcript, which only listed her maiden name, Sipuel, the court documents do not include her marital name.

3 The fictitious name of Nia Lytle is an intentional coupling of Nia, one of the seven Kwanzaa principles which means purpose, and Lytle, to honor Lucy Lytle, the first Blackwoman licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee (the author’s home state), the third Blackwoman to receive a law degree, and one of the early women law school professors. Nia is a compilation of the author’s lived experiences with some fictious accounts.

4 The late Howard Law professor, J. Clay Smith, compiled a rare collection of writings by Blackwomen lawyers in a book titled Rebels in Law (1998).

5 The oral arguments took place April 1, 2003, April 1, 2003, October 10, 2012, and December 9, 2015 respectively but for this writing they occur in one session to aid in my case for the relevance of gendered-race dynamics in college admissions access. The oral arguments presented in the counterstory are shared verbatim from the historical record – including punctuation with no truncation and ellipses. I use the narrative framing of the counterstory to contextualize these verbatim transcripts.

6 In Bell’s (1987) book, Geneva addresses the U.S. Constitution framers during the Constitutional Convention about how their decisions will have future irreparable consequences for racial equity. She can address them without interruption due to “a cylinder composed of thin vertical bars of red, white, and blue light descended swiftly and silently from the high ceiling, nicely encapsulating the podium and me [Crenshaw]” (p. 27).

7 Ada was a professor and department chair of social sciences at Langston University. Bell (1987) includes in his description of Geneva that she was a law professor at Howard Law School.

8 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in October 2020. This reference is to honor her legacy on the Supreme Court.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

LaWanda W. M. Ward

LaWanda W.M. Ward is an assistant professor of higher education and research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University. She engages interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives to investigate legal issues in U.S. higher education including race-conscious admissions, free speech, and promotion and tenure policies.