Gross, What Blood Won't Tell - A History Of Race On Trial In America

Abstract

In recent decades, biological and social scientists have rejected the notion of distinct human races. Rather, they assert, race was a creation of human culture, crafted to help manufacture, sustain, and justify socio-political and economic hierarchies. In What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial, Ariela Gross, professor of history and law, uses race trials from the antebellum period to the present as a window into how local communities of common white America shaped and reshaped our racial understandings through their legal systems in order to preserve their hierarchies.