Carrol
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Cohen underlined his scientific illiteracy by speaking of "white genes"--entities known to no geneticist that I am aware of.[3] But in May of 1987, the Supreme Court of the United States provided a much more serious example--more serious precisely because it *was* the Supreme Court and not a half-baked journalist. The Supreme Court had to decide whether Jewish and Arab Americans could seek relief under civil-rights law for acts of discrimination against them. Instead of taking its stand on the principle that discrimination against anybody is intolerable in a democracy, the Court chose to ask whether Jews and Arabs are racially distinct from "Caucasians." If so, then civil-rights laws forbidding "racial" discrimination might be applied to them. The Court decided that, because Jews, Arabs and a variety of nationalities were regarded as racial groups in the late nineteenth century, they may therefore be so considered today. In other words, the Court knew no better way to rectify injustice at the end of the twentieth century than to re-enthrone the superstitious racial dogma of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Supreme Court had little choice, bound as it is by American precedent and history--bound, that is to say, by its participation in those rituals that daily create and re-create race in its characteristic American form. The Supreme Court acts, no less than Jimmy the Greek, within the assumptions, however absurd, that constitute racial ideology in the United States. Unfortunately, so do historians and other academic specialists, who vitally need to take a distance from these assumptions in order to do their job.
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. . . themost embarassing question of all, the one that stumped the scientific racists of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: how to assign the subjects of the experiments to one "race" or the other without assuming the very racial distinction the experiment is supposed to prove? Try as they would, the scientific racists of the past failed to discover any objective criterion upon which to classify people; to their chagrin, every criterion they tried varied more within so-called races than between them. It is likely that Brokaw's neo-racist would find the same true of muscular movements had he the honesty and intelligence to pose the question
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