Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T14:22:22.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Telling the Difference: Nineteenth-Century Legal Narratives of Racial Taxonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

“Telling the Difference” focuses on two legal opinions from the nineteenth century that carefully distinguish between those who should be racially marked as nonwhite and those who should not. In the first instance, a Michigan judge decides the appropriate “blood fraction” of African-American heritage that would prohibit a free man from voting. In the second, a New Mexico judge rules that the Native Americans of Cochiti Pueblo are not legally “Indians,” and therefore not entitled to federal protection of their land. The article uses these examples to advance two central claims: that we must pay close attention to the narrative logic of racial identification in order to understand the powerful contradictions still at the heart of our conversations about race, and that in doing so we should consider that race has always been multiply constructed in the United States.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1999 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Anonymous. 1866. Negro Characteristics. Detroit Free Press , 2 October, p. 3. [1890] 1969. History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan. Detroit: Gale Research.Google Scholar
Basso, Keith S. 1979. History of Ethnological Research. In Ortiz 1979, 1421.Google Scholar
Bederman, Gail. 1995. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bieder, Robert E. 1986. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz. 1982. Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Free Press, 1940. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John, B. Thompson, trans. Raymond, Gino and Adamsom, Matthew. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, James. 1876. Outlines of the Political History of Michigan. Detroit: Schober.Google Scholar
Cheyfitz, Eric. 1993. The Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. McIntosh and The Pioneers . In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan, Amy and Donald, E. Pease, 109–28. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Child, Lydia Maria. [1824] 1986. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Felix S. 1986. Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Davis, F. James. 1991. Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Deloria, Vine Jr., and Lytle, Clifford. 1984. The Nations Within: The Past and Present of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Domínguez, Virginia R. 1986. White by Definition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Drinnon, Richard. 1980. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. New York: New American Library.Google Scholar
Elliott, Michael A. 1998. Ethnography, Reform, and the Problem of the Real: James Mooney's Ghost-Dance Religion . American Quarterly 50:201–33.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Robert A. 1990. The Judicial Opinion as Literary Genre. Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 2(1):201–19.Google Scholar
Finkelman, Paul. 1993. The Crime of Color. Tulane Law Review 67:2063–112.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George. 1971. Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gotanda, Neil. 1995. A Critique of “Our Constitution is Color-Blind.” In Critical Race Theory, ed. Crenshaw, Kimberlé et al., 257–75. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Gross, Ariela J. 1998. Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South. Yale Law Journal 108:109–88.Google Scholar
Hagan, William T. 1985. Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity. Arizona and the West 27:309–26.Google Scholar
Haney-López, Ian F. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Howells, William Dean [1892] 1970. An Imperative Duty. Vol. 17 of A Selected Edition. of William Dean Howells, ed. Gottesman, Robert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. 1953. Simple Takes a Wife. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Katzman, David M. 1973. Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Krupat, Arnold. 1996. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Matsuda, Mari J. 1987. Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations. Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 22:323–99.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. 1995. Our America Nativism, Modernism, and Pluratism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ortiz, Alfonso, ed. 1979. Southwest. Vol. 9 of The Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William, C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.Google Scholar
Otis, D. S. 1973. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1934. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Pearce, Roy Harvey. 1988. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the American Mind. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Plane, Ann Marie, and Button, Gregory. 1993. The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849–1869. Ethnohistory 40:587618.Google Scholar
Prucha, Francis Paul. 1984. The Great Father: The U.S. Government and the Indians. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
1994. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Richard. 1998. Participant in “A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton. Moderator Jim Lehrer. PBS, 13 July.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race in the Making of the American Middle Class. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Saks, Eva. 1988. Representing Miscegenation Law. Raritan 8(2):3969.Google Scholar
Sale, Maggie Montesinos. 1997. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, Marc. 1979. History of the Pueblos Since 1821. In Ortiz 1979, 206–23.Google Scholar
Smedley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: The Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, Colo: Westview.Google Scholar
Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science. London: Archon Books.Google Scholar
Strong, Pauline Turner, and Barrik Van Winkle. 1996. “Indian Blood”: Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity. Cultural Anthropology 11:547–76.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark 1894 1982. Puddin'head Wilson. In Mississippi Writings, ed. Cardwell, Guy. New York: Library of America.Google Scholar
Wald, Priscilla. 1995. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Robert A. Jr. 1986. The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's Indian Jurisprudence. Wisconsin Law Review 1986:211–99.Google Scholar

Cases

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia , 30 U.S. 1 (1831).Google Scholar
Elk v. Wilkins 112 U.S. 94 (1884).Google Scholar
Gray v. State 4 Ohio 35 (1831).Google Scholar
In re Camille, 6 F. 256 (1880).Google Scholar
Johnson v. McIntosh 21 U.S. 543 (1823).Google Scholar
Jones v Commonwealth, 80 Virginia 538 (1885).Google Scholar
Monroe v Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665 (1867).Google Scholar
People v. Dean, 14 Michigan, 406 (1866).Google Scholar
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).Google Scholar
Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji, 481 U.S. 604 (1987).Google Scholar
Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 395 (1857).Google Scholar
State v. Chavers, 5 Jones (N.C.) 1 (1857).Google Scholar
State v. Treadway, 126 La. 300 (1910).Google Scholar
Thurman v. State, 18 Ala. 276 (1850).Google Scholar
United States v. Joseph , 94 U.S. 614 (1876).Google Scholar
United States v. Lucero , 1 N.M 422 (1869).Google Scholar
United States v. Rogers , 45 U.S. 567 (1846).Google Scholar
United States v. Sandoval , 231 U.S. 28 (1913).Google Scholar