{"id":37450,"date":"2014-09-22T17:53:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T17:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37450"},"modified":"2022-01-11T16:34:48","modified_gmt":"2022-01-11T16:34:48","slug":"making-race-in-the-courtroom-the-legal-construction-of-three-races-in-early-new-orleans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37450","title":{"rendered":"Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

New York University Press<\/a>
\nSeptember 2014
\n272 pages
\n1 figure, 2 tables illustrations
\nCloth ISBN: 9780814724316<\/p>\n

Kenneth R. Aslakson<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of History
\nUnion College, Schenectady, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No American city\u2019s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana<\/a>, which prior to the Civil War<\/a> was home to America\u2019s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans\u2019s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were \u201cnegroes,\u201d free people of color were gens de couleur libre<\/em><\/a>, creoles of color<\/a>, or simply creoles. New Orleans\u2019s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from \u201cnegroes\u201d throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color.<\/p>\n

Much of the recent scholarship on New Orleans examines what<\/em> race relations in the antebellum period<\/a> looked as well as why<\/em> antebellum Louisiana\u2019s<\/a> gens de couleur<\/em> enjoyed rights and privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what<\/em> and why<\/em> questions than with how people of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond their control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom<\/em> argues that race is best understood not as a category, but as a process.<\/strong> It seeks to demonstrate the role of free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No American city\u2019s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America\u2019s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans\u2019s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,1467,369,8,17,20],"tags":[4314,4313,1438,962],"class_list":["post-37450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-law","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-kenneth-aslakson","tag-kenneth-r-aslakson","tag-new-orleans","tag-new-york-university-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62751,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37450\/revisions\/62751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}