Academic

Legal Theory Bookworm

By Lawrence Solum

The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America by Ariela J. Gross.  Here is a description:

Through a close reading of racial identity trials in America, this book offers an eloquent contribution to ongoing debates over affirmative action, identity politics and the construction of a "colorblind" society. Historian Gross argues that racial identity trials--court cases in which outcomes turned on determining a person's "race" and their concomitant rights and privileges--provides an excellent basis for viewing the construction of "whiteness" and assessing the volatile category of race in American society. The author rigorously examines select cases including the outcomes of suits for freedom by onetime slaves like Abby Guy, who in 1857 convinced an all-white male jury that she was white and thus deserving of freedom. Upsetting the familiar notion of the "one-drop rule" in determining racial identity, Gross shows that in such cases the notion of what constituted race was itself as much in play as whether a particular individual could be identified (through some unstable combination of expert and "common sense" opinion) as one race or another. The social "performance" of identity is key, and enduringly so, as Gross periodically underscores by reference to various modern debates and trends. (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

And from the blurbs:

What Blood Won't Tell brings us at long last a brilliant analysis of the changing meanings of race in American law from the colonial era to the present. It will be indispensable for any informed discussions of a subject that lies at the very core of both American history and identity. 
--David Brion Davis (author of 

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

 )

This exquisite inquiry into the complex and shifting ways in which the 'black-white' divide has been marked over the last three centuries excavates the deep roots of racial identification.
--Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on November 08, 2008 (boomark / email).