MARK S. WEINER. Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 197. $45.00

Abstract

In this short monograph, Mark S. Weiner joins the many academics who have written on the topic of race in the United States. His inquiry focuses on the cultural history of law, with the aim of “depict[ing] a specific language through which the racial character of civic belonging in the Unites States was understood from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century” (p. ix). It is a way of speaking and thinking that he labels “juridical racialism,” one that he examines through the legal experience of nineteenth-century Native Americans; citizens of Hawai'i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico after the Spanish American War; early twentieth-century Asian immigrants; and African Americans at the time of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Consistent with the work of other scholars, Weiner argues that this juridical racialism was “a historically significant discourse of modernization that enabled the United States to manage its civic boundaries in ways that furthered national economic growth” (p. 1). He writes that through its use racial groups were “characterized in terms of legal categories,” often their “ability or inability to uphold legality as a general ideal and to follow specific forms of legal behavior” (p. 2). These rationales and categories undergirded American state development while exploiting the civic and economic status of the particular minority group until, he contends, in the middle of the twentieth century, ways of thinking about race, in law, changed.