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

The average rating for What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-20 00:00:00 Jeffrey Bush From a legal scholar, a study of how American law determined racial classification from local juries, state legislatures and the supreme court--beginning with 1820s cases in which local juries assigned "whiteness" according to the performance (for men, voting and militia muster; for women, virtue and fragility, and "good hair") of 19th century ideals, Reconstruction pressure on Native peoples to exclude African-Americans from allotment, creating a vicious and long-lasting situation in Oklahoma and amongst the Lumbee and Seminole, the legal aftermath of the 1848 Hawai'ian Land Separation and 1893 annexation, hurried moves to independence for the Philippines to cut off immigration from there to the US, California's willingness to grant individual Japanese and Indian "Hindoos" citizenship through equitable estoppel but not whole groups, Norris v. Alabama's complicated application of jury selection rules to Hispanics in Hernandez v. Texas and the current state of blood quantum as held in Rice v. Cayetano.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-08 00:00:00 Jason Johnson Everyone should have to read this book. This was one of the most compelling looks at race I have ever read. Gross looks at court cases where race is on the line from the ante-bellum period to now to show that race is not something that came to us naturally but something that has been made and remade through the courts and communities. People aren't white or black; they perform "white" or "black." This account of race in America truly was so fascinating.