Ian Haney López - White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition (Critical America)

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Praise for the 1st edition of White by Law

As Ian F. Haney Lpez shows in White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, immigrants recognized the value of whiteness and sometimes petitioned the courts to be recognized as white. Through an analysis of the prerequisite cases in the 19th and 20th centuries, Lpez argues for the centrality of law in constructing race.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

This book is remarkable for sheer information value, but draws its analytic power from the emphasis on Whiteness to make sense of racial oppression. Haney Lpez convincingly demonstrates that the United States is ideologically White not by accident but by design.a provocative and worthwhile volume, highly recommended for graduate students and faculty.

Choice

Haney Lpez shares with us an historical narrative, one that few contemporary Americans know. It is a narrative about citizenship and racism. Those who want to pretend that racism is nothing but a ghost from a distant past must ignore history. The work of legal historians like Haney Lpez and books like White by Law make it harder to indulge in this delusion of a color-blind society. This alone makes the book a worthy read.

Buffalo Law Review

Haney Lpez has written a great book. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race deserves the highest praise that his colleagues in the academy can give a scholarly study: sympathetic readers and reviewers may be prompted to say, I wish Id written that. Haney Lpezs book is perhaps one of the finest works yet produced by the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement.

Asian Law Journal

Demonstrating the complexities of race relation is where White by Law begins, not ends. Haney Lpez has blazed a trail for those exploring the legal and social constructions of race in the United States.

Berkeley Womens Law Journal

White by Law drives home how race has been legally constructed, consciously and unconsciously, with great clarity and force. [Haney Lpezs] normative argument is equally compelling. A fine contribution to important debates.

The American Journal of Legal History

While his research is based upon the technicalities of legal cases, this book never becomes bogged down in law-review prose. This examination of the legal construction of race is an important contribution to contemporary debates about the role of Whites in American racism.

Contemporary Sociology

Unreservedly recommended as integral to the reading list of the so-called ethnic studies programs. Of course, the general critical reader is also invited to take a sumptuous bite.

New York Amsterdam News

A fascinating, useful book about race in American society. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the current immigration debate, but it is also an important, original contribution to critical race theory.

Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School

With a clear and lucid style, Haney Lpez takes us to the cutting edge of race theory: the construction of whiteness. His book is unsettling, thought-provoking, and iconoclastic.

Angela Harris, University of California, Berkeley

An important contribution to our understanding of the role the law has played in the social architecture of race, race consciousness, and specifically white race consciousness in American life.

Gerald Torres, University of Texas, Austin

Ian F. Haney Lpez performs a major service for anyone truly interested in understanding contemporary debates over racial and ethnic politics. He thoroughly investigates and illuminates centuries of legal interpretation of the term white, a trait required for so long before a noncitizen could attain citizenship in the United States. By documenting an enduring judicial resistance to evidencewhether founded in admittedly problematic expert claims or in empirical observations White by Law exposes the dangerous power of prejudice given the force of law. This is a sobering and crucial lesson for a society committed to equality and fairness.

Martha Minow, Harvard Law School

White by Law

Critical America

General Editors: RICHARD DELGADO and JEAN STEFANCIC

White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race by Ian Haney Lpez, originally published in 1996, was the inaugural book in the Critical America series. For a complete list of titles in the series, please visit the New York University Press website at www.nyupress.org .

The Legal Construction of Race

Revised and Updated
10th Anniversary Edition

Ian Haney Lpez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2006 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haney Lpez, Ian.
White by law : the legal construction of race / by Ian Haney
Lpez.
Rev. and updated, 10th anniversary ed.
p. cm.(Critical America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3698-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-3698-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3694-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-3694-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Race discriminationLaw and legislationUnited States.
2. WhitesLegal status, laws, etc.United States. I. Title.
II. Series.
KF4755.H36 2006
342.730873dc22
2006010913

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my family
Terrence Eugene Haney
Maria Daisy Lpez de Haney
and
Garth Mark Haney
with love.

Then, what is white?

Ex parte Shahid

The son of a White father from the United States and a brown-skinned mother from El Salvador, I grew up in Hawaii, a place that found my mixed identity unproblematic, indeed almost typical. It was not until I arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, for college that I encountered on a sustained basis racial dynamics troubled by my identity. I was struck first, though, not by the question of my own location in mainland racial patterns, but by the patterns themselves. Never had I seen an environment so starkly segregated between White and Black. Even more startling, I could scarcely believe just how natural and commonplace such extreme segregation seemed to virtually all of my White peers and professors. No one ever talked about the overwhelming Whiteness of our academic world, or the Blackness of those doing menial work in our midst or populating the decaying city to the campuss eastour Manichean world was, literally, unremarkable.

It was this seemingly natural order that my identity disturbed, for I moved at the margin between White and non-White. There were some curious incidents, and a few ugly episodes as wellthe double-take from professors when they first called roll and I raised my hand, a door slammed in my face to the yell of go back where you came from (and believe me, I wanted nothing more than to return to Hawaii). But on the whole I was treated well. Or rather, as I would eventually come to understand, I was treated White.