Sua Sponte
Robert Chang JD/MA ’92 returned to Duke Law School to deliver the inaugural Jerome M. Culp, Jr. Critical Theory Lecture on Feb. 1 before students, faculty, and members of Culp’s family.
Chang, a professor of law and executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law, was a friend and colleague of Culp, a member of the Duke Law faculty from 1985 until his death on Feb. 5, 2004, and the school’s first tenured professor of color. A prolific scholar, Culp was internationally known for his work on race and the law and was the author of numerous books and articles on critical race theory, justice and equality, law and economics, and labor economics.
Chang titled his lecture, “How Do We Come to Participate in the Struggles of Those Who Are Not Us?,” after words he first heard from Culp. He was introduced by Trina Jones, the Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Center on Law, Race & Policy, which sponsored the event.
Born in Korea and raised in a small midwestern town, Chang said he endured name-calling and racial slurs by staying silent and focusing on academic achievement.
“Although I would never claim to know what it is to be Black in America, I do know what it is like to be an ‘other,’” Chang recalled. “I wasn’t equipped to deal with racism so I put that experience and those feelings in a box and I just put them away in the closet.”
It wasn’t until law school that he began to find a language and lens to understand racism through exposure to Culp and other scholars at events like the annual Duke Law Journal Frontiers of Legal Thought symposium.
“He wrote that who we are matters as much as what we are and what we think,” Chang said. “He gave me the courage to speak.”
