{"id":7453,"date":"2010-06-03T01:57:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T01:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=7453"},"modified":"2016-06-09T20:09:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T20:09:38","slug":"real-americans-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=7453","title":{"rendered":"Real Americans [Book Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Real Americans [Book Review<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p>\n

The Virginia Quarterly Review<\/a>
\nSpring 2009
\npages 206-210<\/p>\n

Oscar Villalon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

What Blood Won\u2019t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America<\/a><\/em>, by Ariela J. Gross<\/a>. Harvard University Press, October 2008.<\/p>\n

As a child, there were the Americans, and then there was us.<\/p>\n

Americans weren\u2019t that plentiful in my grandmother\u2019s neighborhood. The next-door neighbor to the right, he was an American. He was an older man, and he had a big grey dog chained up in his backyard. On New Year\u2019s Eve, two of his sons got into an argument, so one of them went into a room and came back with a pistol and shot his brother dead, right there in the hallway. My grandmother\u2019s other neighbors, two doors down, used to shoot off guns all the time too. They weren\u2019t Americans. My uncle was roller-skating up and down the street once, when a car pulled up in front of the neighbor\u2019s home. Just as my uncle skated by the car, the rear window lowered, and a shotgun slid out. He screamed. The window sucked back the shotgun and the car tore off. The guys in the car weren\u2019t American, either…<\/p>\n

Much wrangling\u2014legal and intellectual\u2014has gone into delineating which Americans are really Americans and which are not fully Americans: black, Indian, Latino, or Asian. How that was reckoned in our country\u2019s history is at the heart of Ariela J. Gross\u2019s<\/a> book, What<\/em> Blood Won\u2019t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America<\/em><\/a>. A professor of law and history at the University of Southern California, Gross examines various court transcripts and federal rulings, stretching back to the years just before the Civil War and going well into the twentieth century, to make sense of how Americans\u2014white Americans\u2014decided whether a person (or an entire group of people) was just like them and so should be afforded all the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights<\/a>. 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, \u201cnon-white\u201d (Native Americans and immigrant groups that didn\u2019t come from Europe), and white\u2014the people my grandmother and so many others refer to as, simply, Americans.<\/p>\n

The necessity for classification, Gross writes, stems from \u201cthe peculiar institution.\u201d In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, slavery had to be justified by the ideal that one group of people was intrinsically suited to be chattel and another group of people was meant to wield the whip. Slavery depended on a lot of people buying into \u201ca powerful ideology,\u201d the notion of race. \u201cFundamental to race is a hierarchy of power\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. a human Chain of Being<\/a>, with white at the top and black at the bottom.\u201d For the institution to survive, a slave\u2019s \u201cblackness\u201d\u2014those qualities identifying him as being descended from the tribe of Ham<\/a>\u2014had to be indisputable. The trouble was, if a slave didn\u2019t have, say, dark brown skin and kinky hair, it sometimes wasn\u2019t clear how to categorize him. This uncertainty would prove to be a persistent problem, which, Gross shows, isn\u2019t surprising. The need to separate people was working against an unacknowledged truth about the roots of the country. Namely, there was never a time when people of different skin colors and cultures didn\u2019t mix with each other, whether by their own volition or against their will.<\/p>\n

Colonial America, Gross writes, was a rather mixed society. Not only were there communities of African Americans, some of whom were never slaves, but there were robust Indian nations, too, throughout the Eastern seaboard. And into these nations African Americans were often welcomed, as were some European Americans. Some were free blacks, some were former slaves; they took Indian spouses, had children, and conformed to their adopted culture. Some Indian groups, such as the Five Civilized Nations<\/a>, held black slaves. They even fought on the side of the Confederacy. There was, of course, some integration between slave and master in these groups, just as there was in the white antebellum South<\/a>. In early America, with each wave of births, and with the country\u2019s ever-expanding territorial domain (meaning new towns were constantly forming where people showed up with little or no documentation of their past), the only way to know for sure if somebody was black or white was to find out whether or not he or she had a master.<\/p>\n

This was especially the case in the South, but even there, presumably irrefutable proof wasn\u2019t enough. Take the case of Alexina Morrison, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Louisiana woman who claimed she was not a born slave but rather a kidnapped white woman. Gross offers her case as an exemplar of how the first racial-identity trials worked: they were decided at the local level, settled by juries of white men who were ultimately more interested in how the plaintiff acted rather than how she appeared. Though Morrison \u201cwas undoubtedly a slave, and almost certainly had some African ancestry,\u201d and despite the testimony of doctors that she was biologically black, and despite an examination of her body in court, where parts of her were poked and prodded for the \u201chidden marks of race,\u201d Morrison was granted her freedom because, to use a sociological term, she \u201cperformed\u201d white. Performing as a white woman, Gross writes, meant displaying unimpeachable moral virtue and chasteness. That, and already being accepted as white by the local community, took precedence, not only in Morrison\u2019s case, but in so many others. Gross cites how \u201c[d]espite the visual power of exhibition, not all candidates for whiteness were paraded before the jury, and even when they were, jurors were given many reasons not to believe their own eyes. Only 20 of 68 case records from the 19th Century South referred explicitly to inspections.\u201d What\u2019s more, \u201c[o]nly 2 of 20 relied solely on physical appearance, and only one case relied on physical appearance plus a single type of evidence,\u201d such as the plaintiff not having the \u201chollow arches\u201d of a biologically white woman. In another case, Hudgins v. Wright, the plaintiff, Hannah, won her freedom by convincing the court she was Indian and not black. She claimed that her mother, a slave, was Indian. Her \u201cred complexion\u201d and straight hair, as well as what was described as a noble character, were proof she couldn\u2019t possibly be black. The court\u2019s ruling confirmed, Gross writes, that \u201cIndians were by default citizens of a free nation; Africans were by default members of an enslaved race.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Real Americans [Book Review] The Virginia Quarterly Review Spring 2009 pages 206-210 Oscar Villalon What Blood Won\u2019t 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\u2019t that plentiful in my grandmother\u2019s neighborhood. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,125,1467,8,3015,20],"tags":[880,873,3102,3103],"class_list":["post-7453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-law","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-ariela-gross","tag-ariela-j-gross","tag-oscar-villalon","tag-the-virginia-quarterly-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453","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=7453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47480,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions\/47480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}