By Ariela J. Gross
Is race something we know when we see it?
In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her
master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection.
Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that
she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured
the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a
drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the
last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil
rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.
Over
the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican
Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to
establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in
local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S.
Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less
on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than
on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their
moral and civic character.
Unearthing
the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the
paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived
capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that
the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for
citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice
and equality.
“Gross supplies a specific accounting of the contortions into which communities and the courts tangled themselves while trying to figure out who was really white or black, or something else. And she looks at the consequences of this thinking, how it divided a nation into black, "non-white" (Native Americans and immigrant groups that didn't come from Europe), and white - the people my grandmother and so many others refer to as, simply, Americans.”
Join us for this year's Award Ceremony
DeKalb County Public Library
Decatur, Georgia
Sunday, September 2, 2012
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