Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson
Open accessAbstract
The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of “separate but equal,” which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible in him.” This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial “passing.” The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth century created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called upon to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial response to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law's role not only in the treatment of racial groups, but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Justice Harlan's conception of color-blindness both allows and requires judicial attention to the social and political forces through which race was made meaningful.
“By drawing on Justice Harlan's analysis of racial pride and cases beyond Plessy, Golub (2005) argued that Justice Harlan's conception of color-blindness both allows and requires judicial attention to the social and political forces through which race was made meaningful (593).”
From Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society (2017) · cites this paper as Golub 2005
The Court's contemporary color-blindness more closely resembles the majority in Plessy than Justice Harlan's dissent.
“In contrast, the Court's contemporary color-blindness 'more closely resembles the majority in Plessy than Justice Harlan's dissent' (596).”
From Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society (2017) · cites this paper as Golub 2005
Justice Harlan's conceptualization of a color-blind racial ideology ignored the historical underpinnings of racism that had been written into the law, the social construction of race, and the social and material consequences of racism.
“Justice Harlan's conceptualization of a color-blind racial ideology ignored the historical underpinnings of racism that had been written into the law”
From Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society (2017) · cites this paper as Golub 2005
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Annamma, S. A., Jackson, D. D., & Morrison, D. (2017) · Race Ethnicity and Education · doi:10.1080/13613324.2016.1248837 · Cited by 738 · see citing works
- Authors
- Golub, M.
- Affiliations
- Scripps College (US)
- Corresponding author
- Golub, Mark
- Venue
- Law & Society Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2005-09
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 563-600
- ISSN
- 0023-9216 (ISSN-L)
- 1540-5893
- OpenAlex
- W2056555714
- Cited by
- 37
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 5 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 6.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Law & Society Review (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Law, Rights, and Freedoms
- Social Sciences › Law › Judicial and Constitutional Studies
- Keywords
- Plessy v. Ferguson, racial passing, racial ambiguity, racial identity, Jim Crow segregation, separate but equal doctrine, Supreme Court, nineteenth-century United States
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
