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9.3: A Historical Legacy- The Legal Construction of Race

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    324925
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    American law has historically served to define racial categories and allocate rights and privileges accordingly. The U.S. Constitution itself was a foundational racial project, enshrining slavery through the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly limited citizenship to “free White persons,” legally constructing Whiteness as a prerequisite for national belonging (Haney López 2006). This framework was upheld in pivotal Supreme Court cases. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Court ruled that Black people could not be citizens. In Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923), the Court grappled with the citizenship eligibility of Asian immigrants, revealing the shifting and unscientific nature of the “White” category.

    The post-Reconstruction era saw the rise of Jim Crow laws, a comprehensive system of legalized racial apartheid in the South. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal,” provided the constitutional foundation for this system. This was a clear racial project that reorganized social space and redistributed public resources overwhelmingly to the advantage of Whites.


    9.3: A Historical Legacy- The Legal Construction of Race is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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