This text explores what identity politics, feminist theory and multiculturalism can contribute to a vision of a more just society. Matsuda draws on her own experience as a Japanese American and examines images of racism in the media and mass culture.

Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude. In this important book, four prominent legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory draw on the experience of injury from racist hate speech to develop a first amendment interpretation that recognizes such injuries. In their critique of first amendment orthodoxy, the authors argue that only a history of racism can explain why defamation, invasion of privacy, and fraud are exempt from free-speech guarantees while racist and sexist verbal assaults are not.The rising tide of verbal violence on college...