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New York University law professor Devon W. Carbado delivered the annual Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture at Harvard Law School Tuesday, discussing the “afterlife” of chattel slavery.

The lecture series was established in 2022 by University Provost John Manning ’82 — then the HLS Dean — and named after an enslaved person owned by HLS benefactor Isaac Royall Jr., HLS interim Dean John C.P. Goldberg said at the beginning of Tuesday’s event.

“It was to honor Belinda Sutton and other enslaved persons whose labor contributed to the Law School’s creation, to deepen our understanding of the legacy of slavery, and to further the unfinished work of advancing equal justice,” Goldberg said.

Carbado opened his lecture by explaining its title: “Law and the Afterlife of Slavery.” The concept of the “afterlife of slavery” — coined by African American studies scholar Saidiya V. Hartman — refers to the ongoing ramifications slavery has on the lives of Black people today, an open relationship with “unfinished business.”

“Slavery wasn’t just an event that happened in the past,” Carbado said. “It was a form of social engineering that was always already making a racially subordinating future.”

Carbado divided his lecture into three acts — race as a social construction, structural racism, and constitutional law.

“Slavery wired racial inequality and black subordinaity into the social construction of race,” Carbado said, adding that the notion of race developed from an initial idea into a set of “rules of racial mapping,” or how individuals are assigned to a racial category.

“If I were to say, ‘Hey, I’m a white guy,’ that claim is easily falsifiable, precisely because of some of the rules of racial mapping,” he said.

The process of racial mapping, according to Carbado, has been constructed by a long history of U.S. court rulings. He specifically pointed to Hudgins v. Wright, an 1806 Virginia Supreme Court case that defined certain physical attributes like “wooly” hair or a “flat” nose as criteria that legally assigned black people to a race.

Carbado said that racial mapping easily evolves into social meaning, attributing a status such as “inferior” to Black people, and the status, in turn, perpetuating the injustice of slavery.

Even after the Reconstruction era and civil rights movement, Carbado said there is a lingering “remainder” of the effects of slavery, never being completely resolved.

“The Civil Rights check has never been enough to attend to the racial inequality problem to which that check has been applied,” he said.

Carbado concluded Tuesday’s lecture with his claim that the law, particularly constitutional protections, creates a “lose-lose” situation for Black Americans, pointing to the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment — which he called “an inequality preserving juridical regime” — as a salient example.

“The Supreme Court has built a wall, brick by brick, that gets in the way of doing precisely what we said would be a way to effectuate a structural move in the domain of race,” Carbado said.

He pointed to the search and seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from “unreasonable” searches and seizures, as another avenue through which the impacts of slavery persist through the courts.

“So the police may follow people, the police may chase people, the police may question people, — ‘Where are you going? Where have you been? What are you doing?’” Carbado said. “None of that triggers the fourth amendment.”

He added that the U.S. judicial system has failed to build a functional relationship between law enforcement and Black people. “Instead, the court treats black people’s attempts to avoid the police as a fugitive act, the act of stealing oneself away from the police,” Carbado said.

By terming specific Black-populated regions as “high-crime,” Carbado said the courts continue to practice anti-blackness at the highest level.

“The Supreme Court’s application of this ‘high-crime area’ — that primarily constructs not just spaces and places, but peoples and bodies, juridically writing crime into blackness and anti-blackness into law,” he said.