I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity)

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

The determination of race was often a matter for the legal system, as it had significant implications for immigration and citizenship. In Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, Tanya Golash-Boza states: For centuries, the citizenship and racial statuses of people living in the United States were questioned and challenged. Some immigrants, like Mexicans and Armenians, could be classified as white. Before arriving in the United States, Armenians, like Japanese and Italians, were not white. They had not yet been assigned a race. Eventually, each national-origin group in the United States was assigned a racial category. The assignment of whiteness to Armenians and Italians and non-whiteness to Japanese would have enduring effects on their social location in the United States. . . . The relationship between common knowledge and law is circular. When judges decided who was legally white, they were not able to separate themselves from the unconscious biases inherent in common knowledge. At the same time, their decisions reinforced common knowledge about who was not white. Similar processes occurred with identification of the Irish, Jews, and Italians, people who today are nearly universally accepted as white.