Tuesday, September 6, 2011
1st Blog Post of the Semester! (: The Relationship of Race to Law
I want to write my 1st blog about the relationship of race, to law and politics. This is obviously the focus of the 1st few readings. White Lines brings up the idea that law constructs race. (10) I completely agree. The Rebirth of Caste talks about how when race issues are in the forefront, politicians use it as their platform to convince voters to switch parties. More importantly, the sad thing is when people want certain "resentments" to be maintained- so they'll support the party that isn't pushing for reforms or equal rights. Once certain laws do get passed though, whether it is segregation or integration, law makers / passers need to understand that the changing of laws is obviously going to create some upheaval. Under the Birth of Mass Incarceration, it talks about how segregationists "went further, insisting that integration causes crime." Well yeah, it may initially cause crime because it is a change in law that people are not used to. Moving onto White Lines, it consistently repeats that law constructs race. Page 15 particularly got my attention when it stated "what we look like, the literal and racial features we in this country exhibit, it is to a large extent the product of legal rules and decisions." This made me think about how law shapes how people are represented. For instance, affirmative-action. White politicians may put something in place to supposedly "help" minorities. But this then frames them in a certain way and may only help them to a certain extent. I believe that law does contribute to the racism in our country today.
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You know, the line "what we look like, the literal and racial features we in this country exhibit, is to a large extent the product of legal rules and decisions," also gave me pause when I first read it.
ReplyDeleteConsider, for example, that miscegenation laws which prohibited inter-racial marriages in the U.S. were only deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967. Furthermore, women who were U.S. citizens could lose their citizenship until 1922 if they married a non-citizen. After 1922, they could still lose their citizenship if they married someone who was "ineligible for citizenship" such as someone of Asian descent.
These laws, combined with immigration restriction laws and naturalization laws, were essentially dictating 1) which racial groups were entering the United States 2) who people were allowed to marry, thus ensuring some fictive "racial purity."
I think it's quite easy to thing of the United States having a white majority population as something that simply occurred "naturally" or by happenstance. Of course, understanding how laws restricted people of certain races from immigrating to the United States, restricted some of them from naturalization, and generally restricted who they could get married to, shows how even something as fundamental as the demographics of the United States was, for the better part of its history, socially constructed.