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Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mark Golub
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Abstract

The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of “separate but equal,” which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible in him.” This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial “passing.” The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth century created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called upon to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial response to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law's role not only in the treatment of racial groups, but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 563 - 600
Copyright
© 2005 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2002 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association and Western Political Science Association. I am grateful for the helpful comments I received from audience members and discussants on both panels. I also wish to thank Harry Hirsch, Tracy Strong, George Lipsitz, Tom Kim, Benjamin Marquez, Steven Light, and several anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights, as well as Constance Jordan for generous editorial assistance.

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