Telling the difference: Nineteenth-century legal narratives of racial taxonomy

"Telling the Difference" focuses on two legal opinions from the nineteenth century that carefully distinguish between those who should be racially mar ked as nonwhite and those who should not. In the first instance, a Michigan judge decides the appropriate "blood fraction" of African-American heritag e that would prohibit a free man from voting. In the second, a New Mexico j udge rules that the Native Americans of Cochiti Pueblo are not legally "Ind ians," and therefore not entitled to federal protection of their land. The article uses these examples to advance two central claims: that sue must pa y close attention to the narrative logic of racial identification in order to understand the powerful contradictions still at the heart of our convers ations about race, and that in doing so eve should consider that race has a lways been multiply constructed in the United States.