Christi Cunningham, an associate secretary of regulation at the Department of Labor and a law professor at Howard University, spoke today at the National Action Network’s conference in Washington, D.C. Cunningham started her speech by calling for “justice for Trayvon Martin” and preempting the impending trial of George Zimmerman by asking rhetorically, “Why are people acting like this is a confusing situation and we don’t know what happened? We know exactly what happened, because it’s happened before.” She then moved onto what she called the “criminalization of people of colour nationally and internationally.” This is “probably going to get into a little controversy,” she warned. A video of the event is on C-SPAN’s website.

Cunningham is no stranger to either controversy or the esoteric. She spells her name, Professor e. christi cunningham, without capitals – like e. e. cummings — and her most recent papers, as listed on her academic profile, cover the vital topics of “Preserving Normal Heterosexual Male Fantasy: The ‘Severe or Pervasive’ Missed-Interpretation of Sexual Harassment in the Absence of a Tangible Job Consequence” and “The ‘Racing’ Cause of Action and the Identity Formerly Known as Race: The Road to Tamazunchale.”

Cunningham ended her speech thus:

We need to deal with the criminalisation of people of color . . . Somebody needs to come out and just say this comes from slavery. Nobody wants to talk about that any more. It was never repaired. We can’t forget about it. It’s not just black people, it’s native Americans, it’s the immigrant population, some immigration population . . . you have to repair the thing. . . Here’s where I’m going to get in trouble. We have to step out of this cycle of abuse and stop wondering why we keep finding ourselves in the same situation. We are not in a post-racial world. But we have to imagine. We have to imagine what the world looks like if it’s not directed by the system, the paradigm that slavery created. Slavery created this racial paradigm. We have been living in this racial paradigm, this colour paradigm. Is this all we have to work with? Is there nothing else that we can imagine? I’m going to sit down because I was doing good before I got here.

The convention was kicked off by Eric Holder, who currently heads up the Justice Department in the Obama administration.