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Williams Project's Professor Devon Carbado Earns Prestigious Fletcher Fellowship

May 20, 2005

Williams Project Faculty Advisory Committee Member and UCLA School of Law Professor Devon Carbado has been awarded a $50,000 fellowship from the Fletcher Foundation to further his work in critical race theory and race relations. Carbado has been a member of the UCLA School of Law faculty since 1997 and was a founding member of the Williams Project Faculty Advisory Committee.

This fellowship gift, modeled after the Guggenheim awards, is part of a larger Fletcher Foundation program to mark the 50th Anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The Fletcher Foundation is a not-for-profit private charitable organization that was created by Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. in 1993. The Fletcher Foundation seeks to invest in, and thereby provide strong returns for, communities.

Professor Carbado has published numerous articles and books in the area of critical race theory, sexual orientation law, employment discrimination, criminal procedure, and constitutional law.  His books include, Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, and Black Men on Race, Gender and Sexuality: A Critical Reader.

Carbado will employ his fellowship gift to complete three books, including “Working Identity” with co-author Professor Mitu Gulati.  This book conceptualizes a new type of employment discrimination: the pressure imposed on minorities (women, people of color, and gay men and lesbians) to overcome negative stereotypes by engaging in extra "work" that proves they are meeting employer's expectations.  "Working identity" has largely been overlooked by anti-discrimination law because minority employees meet such pressures by changing their behaviors in order to avoid unlawful employer conduct as traditionally defined. Take, for example, a lesbian worker who feels pressure to present as heterosexual at work and, as a result, starts bringing a male friend to work functions as her "boyfriend." Although she may have avoided being fired for her sexual orientation, workplace pressures have imposed upon her the emotional harms of engaging in self-negating behavior and the risk of being seen as duplicitous if she is discovered.  Carbado and Gulati argue such harms should have a remedy; such pressures are employment discrimination.

Carbado was elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law Class of 2000 and is the 2003 recipient of the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching. He teaches Constitutional Law, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Criminal Adjudication and Critical Race Theory. Carbado is a Fellow with the Jamestown Project and a board member of the African American Policy Forum.