Abstract

Excerpted From: Angela E. Addae, Booze, Bars, and Bias: Anti-Blackness in Liquor Licensing Enforcement, 81 Washington and Lee Law Review 1855 (2025) (417 Footnotes) (Full Document)

This Article explores the disharmonious and disturbing influence of race in the enforcement of liquor licenses. Across the length and breadth of this nation, attentive Black revelers bear witness to an all-too-familiar trend signified by the disproportionately frequent closures of Black entertainment businesses. These outlets are neighborhood landscapes that offer much-needed spaces for self-expression, leisure, and subcultural moments. Marked by distinctive features like their location, ownership, music, and target audience, Black entertainment entities encompass a diverse array of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, lodges, and even strip clubs. They are structures within which Black consumers gather to connect, experience a sense of belonging, celebrate local and diasporic identities, and socialize. Many entertainment outlets are Black-owned. But many are also owned and run by non-Black entrepreneurs as business owners of Lebanese, Italian, and South Korean descents--who historically compete for Black patronage.

The locations of Black entertainment businesses also vary. While the majority are situated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, others are in central business districts or in places less proximate to the communities they serve. Perhaps most distinctively, Black entertainment businesses play music originating from Black cultures--from the dancehall, reggae, soca, and compas beats of the Caribbean, to the Afrobeats, hiplife, and amapiano rhythms of West and South Africa, to the hip-hop, jazz, Southern rap, go-go, hyphy, and blues music of Black America. Within the walls of Black entertainment businesses, disc jockeys, Masters of Ceremonies, dancers, and bartenders curate experiences that unite patrons across ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, and zip code. The stakes are high. Besides amusement, these settings provide patrons a temporary solace from the embers of oppression that require others--and more often themselves--to disregard their humanness.

Alcoholic beverages are central to the transcendent experience of many gatherings. Wine, beer, and spirits facilitate the ambiance and camaraderie that lubricate these meetings: the more potent the elixir, the higher the vibrational frequency. From a corporate standpoint, the revenue from liquor sales sustains entertainment businesses as social centers. But there is a downside that goes to the purpose of this Article. Although profits from liquor sales function as the lifeblood of most venues, serving liquor to predominantly Black consumers is what entangles these entities in legal battles and labyrinths of restrictive government regulations. All over the country, there is an inescapable feeling that state agents arbitrarily target Black entertainment businesses for negative liquor licensing action--be it outright refusals to issue a license, burdensome conditions, or license revocations and business closures.

This Article argues that this punitive disposition toward Black entertainment businesses is not just a contemporary phenomenon; rather, it is a practice rooted in centuries of exclusion and regulatory abuse by state and municipal actors. Over the past two centuries, state and local liquor licensing agencies have emerged as contentious battlegrounds where legal, social, and economic factors converge--often to the detriment of the very businesses they were intended to regulate. Throughout the colonial, post-revolutionary, and antebellum eras, state and local boards and commissions have used liquor license regulations to maintain systems of control and preserve the racial status quo ante. By unearthing these historical and ongoing practices, this Article highlights the robust role of state and local governments in perpetuating extensive racialized narratives independent of federal contexts. Though much of the recent attention has been devoted to federal affirmative action schemas, this Article reconceptualizes how legal reform at state and municipal levels might rectify the structural obstacles, stereotypes, and selective enforcement that disproportionately affect Black-owned businesses.

This Article challenges the perception of predominantly Black drinking establishments as trivial or controversial by highlighting their significance as profound sites for meaning-making, cultural production, and reclamation. By doing so, it presents an emic (insider) perspective that counters the negative, inaccurate, and inappropriate etic (outsider) stereotypes often associated with spaces of Black entertainment, leisure, and recreation. Contrary to the image of disorder they are often portrayed as, these venues are significant local spaces shrouded in economic, cultural, and social vitality. Black entertainment businesses contribute significantly to a healthier, more equitable future, making the critical role of administrative bodies in supporting, rather than suppressing, these bastions of Black joy and resistance all the more essential.

This Article integrates legal analysis with qualitative materials, such as in-depth interviews with affected business owners, historical newspaper articles, federal and state litigation dockets, and administrative agency records. By relying on tools such as language, rhetoric, and observation to define the broad contours of racialized administrative power and anti-Blackness in the law, this Article elucidates the specific, often hidden, impacts on businesses operating at this precarious intersection. This mixed-method approach rooted in grounded analyses allows for an understanding of evidence that situates contemporary struggles within a historical context. This design aligns with the work of legal theorists and social scientists who rely on traditions of narrative and storytelling to illuminate the effects of legal structures on marginalized communities. By utilizing methodology to foreground the voices and experiences of communities and businesses most impacted, this Article challenges dominant legal narratives that overlook or misrepresent these realities, and it provides a platform to validate these experiences within the legal discourse.

The genealogy of liquor licensing explored in this Article parallels the incessant conflict between Black Americans reclaiming their personhood and the institutional barriers that wittingly or unwittingly trample Black dignity. Part I provides an overview of barriers to commercial exchange that impede the economic agency of Black entrepreneurs and consumers. By understanding the role of anti-Blackness in the law, this Part sheds light on the systemic denial of personhood through economic disenfranchisement. Part II explores the struggles of Black entertainment businesses related to contemporary liquor licensing regimes shrouded in selective enforcement, hyperregulation, and overpolicing by state regulatory bodies. Part III explains these disparities, chronicling how pre-Civil War liquor licensing regimes relegated Black Americans to a ""property" status to exclude them from accessing liquor. One of the many delineations that deprived enslaved persons of personhood was answered by the question: Who was--and was not--legally eligible to sell and consume alcohol? State-issued authorization to sell distilled spirits represented elevated social status, economic power, and unrestricted agency. State laws barred Black people from possessing liquor, born out of concerns that they would rebel, resist, or--worst--seek to liberate themselves. Part IV argues that after the Civil War, racial stereotyping replaced statutes in enforcing de facto bans on Black liquor access. As the Fourteenth Amendment extended equal protection of the law to all citizens regardless of race, public sentiment subscribed to stereotypes that Black Americans were animalistic or infantile. Not only did these stereotypes help preserve segregation, but they also presupposed that Black people were incapable of responsible alcohol consumption and were innately dangerous under its influence.

Although this Article focuses on liquor license enforcement, its imports go deeper: It advocates preserving spaces where cultural identities flourish and where ethnic communities express themselves, including their ability to serve and consume alcohol, as an integral part of that expression. It is one of many instances in which race has been found to influence routine administrative actions that are integral to running a business, such as securing a permit, complying with zoning ordinances, or appealing a noise complaint. Though agency actions may appear benign on their face, they can be fatal to enterprises struggling under the weight of economic hardship. Businesses that face such undue bureaucratic entanglements operate in regulatory contexts that resemble slavery-era prohibitions on commercial exchange, which have ramifications for their economic bottom line.

[. . .]

For centuries, liquor licensing regulations have been used to justify deprivations of Black movement, association, and leisure. Today, the restrictions on Black liquor access are camouflaged by the legitimacy of the administrative state, a state cloaked in bureaucracy and pretensions of objectivity and fairness. Despite these obstacles, Black entrepreneurs' struggle to obtain or retain liquor licenses is still often deemed due to individual failures that bear no relationship to historical barriers, as if the fault was incompetence in their own business practices decoupled from the societal context in which they seek to do business. When contested, courts routinely side with state agencies because plaintiff entrepreneurs cannot meet evidentiary burdens that require them to demonstrate discriminatory intent. Because applicants do not indicate their race or the race of their patrons on business registrations and reports, liquor license enforcement officials purport to operate without consideration of race.

Though challenges by Black entertainment businesses pertaining to on-premises liquor licenses may seem trivial, inequity in liquor licensing is a tentacle of chattel slavery that preserves racial caste through the limbs of the administrative state. By documenting these abuses against Black entrepreneurs, Black consumers, and Black economic activity, this Article urges a reckoning that rectifies and eliminates barriers to on-premises liquor licenses for Black entertainment businesses. This Article adds to the expanding history of the law's role in suppressing Black congregation and leisure by cataloging the ways in which the administration and enforcement of on-premises liquor licenses dilute Black gatherings and enjoyment. In doing so, it creates a direct link between the institution of chattel slavery and unfair routine closures of Black entertainment businesses. Moreover, by acknowledging the importance of Black entertainment businesses, this Article combats dehumanizing stereotypes and challenges assumptions about Black leisure and recreation. With Black joy and fun at the fore, we resist ideologies that reduce Black people to the value of their labor.

Assistant Professor, University of Oregon School of Law.