The color of blood is red, not black or white. Yet blood, along
with fingerprints, skin, and color is commonly cited as objective
evidence of racial identity. Drawing on this concept of "evidence",
Sarah Chinn deftly interweaves analyses of the history of science,
popular culture, forensic technology and literary texts to examine
how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over
the past century.
Chinn begins her provocative study with an analysis of Mark
Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson to explore how new ways of reading bodies
developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Using Twain's story
of a light-skinned slave baby exchanged with his white master,
Chinn analyses growth of the American scientific passion for
turning people into numbers and bodily characteristics into racial
"identities". Contrasting Nella Larsen's Passing, Wallace Thurman's
The Blacker the Berry, and the notorious Rhinelander miscegenation
scandal of the 1920's, Chinn goes onto explore the meanings of skin
color and racial identity during the Jazz Age.
Chinn further investigates the meaning of "blood" through the
American Red Cross' racial segregation of blood donated by African
Americans and Japanese Americans.
Finally, as technology (e.g. DNA testing) increasingly allows
the body to be "read", Chinn argues that it is simply the latest
enactment of a discourse that seeks to cement racial, gender, and
class identities as empirical rather than constructed and capable
of change. However, the announcement of genetic evidence that
Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemmings'
children offers an alternative vision: that DNA can show Americans
that their bodies are evidence not ofexclusivity but of
multiplicity.
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