Tag: Ariela J. Gross

  • “Becoming Free, Becoming Black” tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery.

  • “Many people portray the history of race in the United States as the rise of the “one drop of blood” rule. We have made too much of this. It was not the one-drop rule that kept the edifice of Jim Crow so strong. Racism could work through many different rules about ancestry, and it did.…

  • A monumental moment in the history of the United States will be celebrated in December when the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery at the close of the Civil War, turns 150 years old. But despite the passage of time, the U.S. continues to struggle with racial inequality.

  • The Evolution of Mixed-Race Historiography and Theory: Inaugural Sawyer Seminar University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus Doheny Memorial Library (DML) East Asian Seminar Room (110C) Friday, 2013-01-18, 14:00-17:00 PST (Local Time) Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars…

  • The “Common Sense” of Race Southern California Law Review Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010) pages 441-452 Neil Gotanda, Professor of Law Western State University College of Law, Fullerton California In What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, Ariela J. Gross provides a compelling and nuanced account of race in…

  • Race, Blood, and What the Alligator Knows: A Review of What Blood Won’t Tell Southern California Law Review Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010) pages 425-440 Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan School of Law From the opening pages of Ariela J. Gross’s What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on…

  • Are you white enough? Salon.com 2008-11-10 Laura Miller, Senior Writer From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary. Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending…

  • Trials contesting racial identity illustrate the ways that racial categories have come into being over the course of U.S. history.  Through them we can observe the changing meaning of race throughout our history, and the changes and continuities in racism itself, from the roots in a slave society up through the twentieth century.  Drawing lines…

  • Reading between the (Blood) Lines Southern California Law Review Volume 83, Number 3 (2010) pages 473-494 Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law Hofstra University School of Law Legal scholars and historians have depicted the rule of hypodescent—that “one drop” of African blood categorized one as Black—as one of the powerful ways that law and society…

  • Real Americans [Book Review] The Virginia Quarterly Review Spring 2009 pages 206-210 Oscar Villalon What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, by Ariela J. Gross. Harvard University Press, October 2008. As a child, there were the Americans, and then there was us. Americans weren’t that plentiful in my grandmother’s neighborhood.…