The law’s tortured efforts at defining race in America
In an earlier post, I mentioned “A Story of Rhythm and Grace,” a book by former rock musician and current pastor Jimi Calhoun about how the church can learn from rock and roll about healing the racial divide. I’ve read a couple more chapters since. I was most taken, so far, by a chapter that delves into the definition of race.
In one section, he cites Professor Ian F. Haney Lopez, who examined legal cases in the United States involving race identity. Calhoun quotes Lopez: “In its first words on the subject of citizenship, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization (process of immigrants becoming U.S. citizens) to White persons.” Calhoun goes on:
The cases that flowed out this law by Congress, known as the prerequisite law, were rife with contradictions: “Judges qualified Syrians as White in 1909, 1910 and 1915, but not in 1913 or 1914.” Asian Indians were “White in 1910, 1913, 1919 and 1920, but not in 1909, 1917, or after 1923…. Asians were not considered White during this period and yet a court in 1909 ruled that Armenians were White, even though their geographic origins made them at least Asian.”
One more quote from Calhoun’s book:
It strikes me as sad that so much energy has been expended to keep the idea of race alive when we cannot even define it with any consistency. Professor Lopez’s book brings attention to the fact that we are not sure what white is, and so it follows that if we can’t be sure who is white, then we can’t be sure who is not.
Ulysses Grant
Homer Plessy
Calhoun also mentions Homer Plessy, who lost his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over his right to sit in the “whites only” section of a railroad car in 1892. His case ushered in the period of “separate but equal” until 1954. Plessy was seven-eighths “white American” (whatever that means) and one-eighth African. He was light-skinned, with straight hair. As Calhoun notes, “no one would have ever known that he was ‘black’ had he not told anyone.” That’s Plessy on the left. I threw in a picture of Ulysses Grant, president from 1869-1877, just for the sake of comparing black-and-white portraits from relatively the same period.
Calhoun’s chapter on our inability to really identify race was further brought home to me by an item on the Poynter Institute journalism web site by Sally Lehrman. She writes on the “Diversity at Work” blog an item entitled, “Scholars Share Ideas about How Journalists Can Better Cover Race.” A pitfall, she points out, is “Thinking we all mean the same thing when we use the word ‘race.’”
In “Racial Formation in the United States,” the influential 1986 book that conferees had come to celebrate, authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant showed that race is not a fixed, stable or objective idea.
Race is a set of categories that the American people continuously police, challenge and change. That means journalists must always ask what people mean by “race.” We should probe and highlight the structures that shape the experience of race.
Calhoun’s chapter gives me some comfort when I read comments and talk to people who declare with absolute certainty what “black” people do, think and feel. It gives me comfort because it reminds me, yet again: They can’t know.
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Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
If they can’t know, then why does this blog even exist? Aren’t you keeping the idea of race alive with this blog, when the very book you are reading says it is foolish to do so since it can’t even be defined?
Also, we have been there, done this on the whole “thinking we mean the same thing when we use the word race”. We had this discussion last month or so.
Personally I think that any attempt to persuade the masses that race can’t be defined is a smokescreen to further blur the lines of debate to make it harder to hold a decent discussion. Only, as anyone who reads these blogs on a regualr basis knows, no one is buying it. ANYTHING can be defined. Claiming it can’t is blatantly false. That doesn’t mean it can’t have multiple definitions either, because many things do. It just means one of the definition has to be the foundation for the discussion/debate.
This blog should be a conduit for such discussions/debates, and sometimes it is. Other times, like in the case of this rather contradictory blog, all it does is move the discussion further away from valuable dialogue into the realm of political correctness and Plato-like philosophical rambling.