Does Race Matter, Does It Exist? Kendall Traces Legal Origins of Race

Author: Abigail Mitchell

Frances Kendall was engaged in conversation when she was told, "Race is purely a social construct." The implications of this statement were that race does not exist nor does it matter.

Kendall began to wonder, "Does race exist and does it matter?" This train of thought led to hours of sorting through Supreme Court rulings and even an in-depth examination of the U.S. Constitution to determine how race - as a social construct - is codified by the law. On Nov. 10, Kendall, who serves as a consultant on organizational change, came to Middlebury College to share her findings.

Kendall explained that she turned to history because "the history of the United States has been racialized since its beginning."

The laws have always served to create a hierarchy of races in which certain privileges are withheld from those on the bottom and granted to those on the top. Kendall first examined the original draft of the constitution which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person, one whole person being anyone who qualified as white. This distinction, according to Kendall's sources, marked "whiteness as a 'neutral baseline.'"

Then, Kendall turned to the Dred Scott case of 1856, which declared that blacks could not qualify as citizens due to their being a "subordinate and inferior class of beings." The year 1896 saw Plessy v. Ferguson, a decision that affirmed in law the "separate but equal" notion of segregation.

Throughout the lecture, Kendall asked students to evaluate how this information made them feel and what about it was unsettling. She paused once in a while to let the full weight of her words sink in.

Next, Kendall went on to talk about immigration.

She pointed out, "Being white remained a prerequisite to naturalization until 1952." Anyone entering the United States had to stand before the court and prove that he or she was white. A group of white men made a (fairly arbitrary) decision based on "common knowledge" and "scientific evidence."

For example, one denial of immigration was justified because "Asian Indians are probably not white." A later court ruled that "Asian Indians are white" after subjecting a potential immigrant to ocular inspection of his skin. The rulings were at the whim of the small group of white men and had a lot to do with their assessment of how much a person would "benefit" the United States.

Kendall then discussed laws that had a detrimental effect on other "non-white" races either living or seeking to live in the United States.

She looked at "Operation Wetback," in which 3.7 million Mexicans were deported in 1954. She cited the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the California Alien Land Law of 1913 and Franklin Roosevelt's Japanese Internment of 1942.

The sum total of these laws is that "non-whites" have been forced into "erasing" their racial background in order to prove their "whiteness" so as to gain access to freedom and opportunity in the United States.

Does this still happen today?

Kendall recounted to her audience a particular conversation she had had with an African-American student attending a small liberal arts college. He mentioned that all his friends were white and that he barely felt black. Kendall attributed this reaction to the expectations of upper-middle class African-Americans to "act white."

At the end of her lecture, Kendall posed a hard question to the white students in the room. She asked whether any of them felt "white guilt" and, if so, whether they thought it was detrimental to them to feel so.

The overall consensus was that many whites had indeed grappled with "white guilt" but that, when it came down to it, the responsibility for a history of bad treatment did not lie in their hands.

Students believed that feeling guilty was not productive but that action in the here-and-now would be a more constructive medium for guilt.

An underlying message in Kendall's speech was the need to talk frankly about issues of diversity.

Kendall even said that if she could not openly discuss issues of race with her friends (white or not) then her relationships would be pretty shallow. She urged her audience to "accept the hand they've been dealt" and "do something with it." We should not ignore the presence of race.

Said Kendall with sincerity, "We can't move on until we talk about it."