Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process

Abstract Race is often discussed as though it were tied to a rigid racial essentialism, but, for long periods of time, race has functioned predominantly as a border concept. That is to say, it has served as a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges—hence the focus throughout much of modern racial thinking on policing the boundaries between the races where racial mixing has occurred. The focus falls especially on the legal, scientific, and philosophical discussions of racial classification in the United States, ranging from the definitions found in laws passed in Colonial Virginia at the turn of the eighteenth century through Virginia’s 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity. Consideration is also given to the way in which the United States imposed its own rigid systems of classifications on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.