THE LAW’S TORTURED EFFORTS AT DEFINING RACE IN AMERICA
By Kurt Greenbaum
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
onversation-about-race/general-news/2009/06/the-la ws-tortured-efforts-at-defining-race-in-america/
J une 3 2009
In an earlier post, I mentioned "A Story of Rhythm and Grace," a
book by former rock musician and current pastor Jimi Calhoun about
how the church can learn from rock and roll about healing the racial
divide. I’ve read a couple more chapters since. I was most taken,
so far, by a chapter that delves into the definition of race.
In one section, he cites Professor Ian F. Haney Lopez, who examined
legal cases in the United States involving race identity. Calhoun
quotes Lopez: "In its first words on the subject of citizenship,
Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization (process of immigrants
becoming U.S. citizens) to White persons." Calhoun goes on:
The cases that flowed out this law by Congress, known as the
prerequisite law, were rife with contradictions: "Judges qualified
Syrians as White in 1909, 1910 and 1915, but not in 1913 or
1914." Asian Indians were "White in 1910, 1913, 1919 and 1920, but
not in 1909, 1917, or after 1923…. Asians were not considered White
during this period and yet a court in 1909 ruled that Armenians were
White, even though their geographic origins made them at least Asian."
One more quote from Calhoun’s book:
It strikes me as sad that so much energy has been expended to
keep the idea of race alive when we cannot even define it with any
consistency. Professor Lopez’s book brings attention to the fact that
we are not sure what white is, and so it follows that if we can’t be
sure who is white, then we can’t be sure who is not.
Calhoun also mentions Homer Plessy, who lost his appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court over his right to sit in the "whites only" section
of a railroad car in 1892. His case ushered in the period of "separate
but equal" until 1954. Plessy was seven-eighths "white American"
(whatever that means) and one-eighth African. He was light-skinned,
with straight hair. As Calhoun notes, "no one would have ever
known that he was ‘black’ had he not told anyone." That’s Plessy
on the left. I threw in a picture of Ulysses Grant, president from
1869-1877, just for the sake of comparing black-and-white portraits
from relatively the same period.
Calhoun’s chapter on our inability to really identify race was further
brought home to me by an item on the Poynter Institute journalism
web site by Sally Lehrman. She writes on the "Diversity at Work"
blog an item entitled, "Scholars Share Ideas about How Journalists
Can Better Cover Race." A pitfall, she points out, is "Thinking we
all mean the same thing when we use the word ‘race.’"
In "Racial Formation in the United States," the influential 1986 book
that conferees had come to celebrate, authors Michael Omi and Howard
Winant showed that race is not a fixed, stable or objective idea.
Race is a set of categories that the American people continuously
police, challenge and change. That means journalists must always
ask what people mean by "race." We should probe and highlight the
structures that shape the experience of race.
Calhoun’s chapter gives me some comfort when I read comments and talk
to people who declare with absolute certainty what "black" people do,
think and feel. It gives me comfort because it reminds me, yet again:
They can’t know.