Abstract
American racial justice opponents regularly wield a desire for peace, stability, and harmony as a weapon to hinder movement toward racial equality. This Essay examines the weaponization of peace historically and in legal cases about property, education, protest, and public utilities. Such peace claims were often made in bad faith and with little or no evidence, and the discord they claimed to address was actually the result of hostility to racial equality. For a time, the Supreme Court rejected dominant peace claims for precisely these reasons. This Essay further documents the weaponization of peace in current attempts to restrict Black Lives Matter protests, denigrate calls for police defunding, outlaw critical race theory, and dismantle affirmative action. By linking these historical and contemporary arguments, this Essay finds that dominant logics of peace mask the injustice, frustration, and despair felt by subordinated groups. The Essay urges closer scrutiny of appeals to peace that primarily function to stifle the pursuit of racial justice and to maintain status quo inequality.
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