Dalton, Harlon L.

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DALTON, Harlon L.

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1969; Yale Law School, J.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James, 57 Olive St., New Haven, CT 06511. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Lawyer, educator, and ordained priest. Admitted to the Bar of New York State, 1973, and to the Bar of Connecticut, 1983; former law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter; affiliated with Legal Action Center, 1973-79; assistant to solicitor general of the United States, U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1979-81; Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1981—, became professor of law; Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James, New Haven, 2001—, became associate rector. AIDS project, New Haven, board member; AIDS Interfaith Network, New Haven, chair; City University of New York, member of board of visitors; served on National Commission on AIDS, 1989-93.

MEMBER: Society of American Law Teachers (board of governors), American Civil Liberties Union (member, board of directors, 1995).

AWARDS, HONORS: Charles H. Revson fellow, Center for Legal Education and Urban Policy, 1979.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Scott Burris and the Yale AIDS Law Project) AIDS and the Law: A Guide for the Public, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1987, revised edition, edited with Judith Leonie Miller and others, published as AIDS Law Today: A New Guide for the Public, 1993.

Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear between Blacks and Whites, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1995.

Contributor to periodicals, including Daedalus.

SIDELIGHTS: Harlon L. Dalton has been affiliated with Yale University since 1981, first as a law professor teaching law, critical race theory, AIDS policy, and ethics, and then as an ordained minister and associate rector of the Episcopal Church of St. James and St. Paul, which is associated with the Yale University Divinity School. Dalton was involved with AIDS education beginning in the 1980s, when it first became a public health issue. Together with Scott Burris and the Yale AIDS Law Project, he edited AIDS and the Law: A Guide for the Public, which contains twenty essays on such topics as doctor-patient confidentiality, screening AIDS workers, the right to treatment, education, and AIDS as it presents problems specific to individual groups. These problems include intravenous drug users, blacks, gays, the prison population, the military, and the legal and medical professions. The book is written to be accessible to general audiences, and begins with a chapter on law for non-lawyers, but its target audience is public health officials, health care and social service providers, lawyers, members of drug treatment programs and support groups, law enforcement, researchers, insurers, and social activists.

At the time the book was published, AIDS-related issues were just beginning to be sorted out. As Norris G. Lang wrote in Social Science Quarterly, while AIDS and the Law is "without question a major contribution to the subject of AIDS and its social, medical, legal, and cultural relations, I consider it a first step in the unfolding phenomenon of AIDS and its cultural embedding." Choice reviewer D. R. Shanklin called AIDS and the Law "an outstanding work on a subject vital to everyone." The book was revised in 1993 as AIDS Law Today: A New Guide for the Public.

Dalton is also the author of Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear between Blacks and Whites, in which he writes about how we must deal with the power and pecking order of race. Dividing the book into two sections, "What White Folk Must Do" and "What Black Folk Must Do," Dalton says whites must "own up" to the race problem and acknowledge that their skin gains them certain privileges. He asserts, though, that "Blacks must also pull together as a community and resist white attempts to create class divisions among blacks," according to a Journal of Blacks in Higher Education critic. "Dalton urges blacks to embrace other immigrants and lower-income groups rather than regard them as rivals for the crumbs that fall off the white table."

Booklist contributor Mary Carroll called Racial Healing "lively and often funny, full of anecdotes that humanize issues too often viewed as abstractions." A Publishers Weekly contributor said that Dalton's personal anecdotes "resonate: he is regularly forced to defend his marriage to a white woman." And Courtland Milloy wrote in Black Book Review that Dalton's autobiographical sketches are "compelling enough to have made for a separate volume." Milloy called Racial Healing "a good book, and I especially liked Dalton's advice to black writers to 'retell our story,' who we are and how racism has affected our lives." Milloy noted that the author feels that the story is out of date and leaves much to be desired, so much so that blacks are not convinced by it. Dalton writes that this "leaves us feeling truly victimized yet unable to pinpoint why," according to Milloy.

As quoted by J. Anthony Lucas in the New York Times Book Review, Dalton commented that "all of us—blacks, whites, and others—too often evade the racial content of our economic and social problems, out of a misplaced belief that race ought to be irrelevant in an enlightened society." He questioned whether it would be best if people lived in a raceless land he has dubbed "Beigia," but then concluded that such a scenario would not solve the problem because race is really not the source of the problem; the problem is the establishment of a pecking order in which some people, for whatever reason, are given superior status over others. Lucas concluded by saying that Dalton "manages to communicate more provocative ideas on this incendiary subject in 246 pages than many authors do in twice the space. Most important, he comes across in this work as a thoroughly decent, compassionate, and thoughtful human being—and how often in this divided land does one get to say that?"