What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America
Ariela J. Gross

The most commonly-known rule about how race is determined in the United States is probably the "one-drop rule," summed up by Booker T. Washington as "It is a fact that, if a person is known to have one percent of African blood in his veins, he ceases to be a white man." What Gross' history of race trials and laws in the U.S. suggests, however, is that the one-drop rule has been more the exception than the rule in cases deciding a person's race. For a lengthy period, in fact, the primary determining factor was whether a person successfully portrayed whiteness—engaging in civic participation (if male), associating with white people, seeming to maintain sexual purity (if female)—with appearance as a secondary aspect. Actual heredity was significantly less important. The primary idea that Gross discusses in the Introduction to her book is that, as only "free white persons" could have citizenship, decisions about whiteness dictated who could engage in full citizenship.

Unfortunately, this theme is not pursued in depth throughout the book. The connections are there, as Gross details how blacks, although eventually considered "citizens," nonetheless lacked full social and legal citizenship. The ambiguous treatment of Filipinos supports this idea as well, as Filipinos were ruled white and not-white in different places and different circumstances, just as they were "American nationals," but not citizens. Similarly, the heavy reliance on whether a man whose race was on trial had a history of voting and civic participation as a determination of whiteness points to the same theme. There is no question that the evidence is there, but Gross never fully details these connections or ties them to an overall theory. It may be, of course, that providing a theoretical argument simply wasn't her goal, and that her goal was instead to simply compile historical data.

This assumption seems less certain considering Gross' Conclusion, though. An Amazon reviewer who seemed to find the book overall valuable wrote, "The major flaw in the book is the Conclusion, in which Gross indulges in a fashionable and politically correct rant against those who believe that racial classifications should not be asked for or legally enforced (affirmative action, the census, etc.). Her Conclusion contradicts the evidence of her own research. Skip the Conclusion and enjoy the rest of the book." While I disagree with this assessment, I do think that the theoretical steps Gross takes in the Conclusion are less than clear, especially since they hearken back to the Introduction rather than to the body of the text.

What Gross is arguing in the Conclusion is that advocates of "colorblindness" believe that "racism is simply the human error of identifying individuals by their race and judging them accordingly," and that such people believe that refusing to recognize racial categories is the solution (299). As explicit legal barriers are removed and racial hierarchies remain in place, the assumption is that these are due to "cultural" reasons.

(An example of this is the idea that blacks have a higher rate of imprisonment because black culture promotes illegal activity or because they live in a "culture of poverty" and thus see crime as an acceptable choice or because they grew up in single-parent households and no one taught them what's right—all of which "reasons" disregard the fact that, very simply, black men are more likely to be arrested, charged, prosecuted, and sentenced to the death penalty, even when all other factors, including severity of offense, are controlled for.)

Gross goes on to argue that "[r]acial groups are groups that have been racialized: Latinos are a race because they are treated as a race," a claim which is certainly borne out by the evidence she presents in the body of the text (306). The path she presents is to acknowledge the history of racialization in the United States and engage with legal remedies accordingly with regard to people who are identified by "the common man" as part of a racial group. Thus, while Gross opposes the concept of race as a biological classification, she argues that the social categorization of race has and has had real and continuing effects upon people who are so categorized.

This is an argument I agree with, and Gross' explanation of how courts can and should handle racial stereotyping is well-made and valuable, as she points out that much like people have been discriminated against for how they performed their gender (e.g., women being fired for not wearing dresses or not behaving "like women") and won court cases as a result, it "should be actionable race discrimination to require people to perform their racial identity in certain ways, such as to wear only 'white' hairstyles" (304). I think this argument could go a little further, however, as it really ties into the idea of performing social roles that Gross discusses at several points in the book. Just as women suing to be considered white pointed to their purity as a sign that they were "respectable," women who want to work in corporate America must point to their "professionalism" as a sign that they are acceptable employees. In both cases, they are performing a particular role, where being the right kind of citizen is being—or performing—whiteness.

I also would have liked to see a little more discussion of how these norms were constructed with regard to signifiers other than race. Gross occasionally addresses differences between how men and women proved (or failed to prove) their "whiteness" to juries, but there isn't a lot of exploration. This is particularly frustrating given that Gross states that sexual purity was crucial for women, but seems to be presenting cases in which women do not fit such a standard; what was it about these women that allowed them to convince others of their purity nonetheless? Additionally, consideration of how class differences might have affected race trials is largely nonexistent; we learn that at least in Mexico, being "white" and being wealthy are tied together, but there isn't a clear indication of how class did or did not impact jury decisions about race.

While overall, Gross does an excellent job of gathering and presenting evidence regarding how race trials display shifting definitions and requirements for "race" in the United States, her theoretical grounding feels slightly lacking. To be clear, I do not mean that it is inaccurate or I disagree with it; it's simply not tied into the body of the text as well as it could be, nor is it explained in as much detail as I would have liked.