Understanding Race as a Relational Concept
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23210957 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natalia Molina (0000-0002-3578-316X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 101-105 |
| Publication date | 2018-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-1851 • E-ISSN: 2515-0456 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/mah.2017.14 |
| OpenAlex | W2792287441 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 5 |
In November 2016, just a few days after the presidential election, Carl Higbie, a spokesman for a super PAC that supported Donald Trump, told Fox News host Megyn Kelly that the new Trump administration was considering a national registry for Muslims in the United States. Higbie argued that the proposal was legal and would "hold constitutional muster," and went on to point out that there was precedent for singling out groups based on their race and religion: "We did it during World War II with the Japanese " Kelly interrupted him, exclaiming, "You're not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope!" Though Higbie said he was not proposing internment camps, he continued to insist that that episode from American history was an important precedent for the President-elect's proposal. Kelly was having none of it. "You can't be citing Japanese internment camps for anything the president-elect is going to do," she balked. 1 Legally, however, Kelly was only partially correct. In February of 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, under which approximately 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps in the U.S. interior. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American, defied the evacuation orders on the premise that he was a U.S. citizen. He was arrested and convicted for denying the orders and his case, Korematsu v. United States, went to the Supreme Court-which ruled that internment was constitutional and justified in a national security crisis. Since then, many have decried this decision. As early as 1961, Time magazine described internment as "an ugly footnote in American history." Subsequent Supreme Court justices have described the decision as "wrong" (Justice Antonin Scalia); "thoroughly discredited" (Justice Stephen Breyer); and one that "will never again survive scrutiny" (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). But here's the rub: the ruling still stands. It has never been overturned. One can muster all the moral indignation one likes, but in the end, the ruling is still available for people to use as a precedent. 2 The fact that Japanese internment still serves as a precedent for a national Muslim registry highlights what's at stake in thinking about race as a relational concept. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who wrote a dissent in Korematsu and would later serve as the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, wrote that the decision was a "loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." This statement is at its heart relational, recognizing the ways in which Japanese internment and later the Korematsu case widened the possibilities for mistreatment of other racialized groups. Here, by relational, I do not mean comparative. A comparative treatment of race compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of one another. It also can leave the construction of the categories themselves unexamined, thus reifying them, even if unintentionally. A relational treatment of race, however, recognizes it as a mutually constitutive and socially constructed
Action (physics) · Content (measure theory) · Physics · Race (biology) · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Mathematics · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.6 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |