Racialization, Process of

The Racialized Social Subject

A crucial point of departure for understanding racialization in education includes appreciating the [Page 1759]way it transforms people into racialized social subjects. Much of social science research suggests that the system of race was invented about 500 years ago. It then solidified in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, where race became a specific legal and everyday term that signified skin groups, rather than something general, as in the “human race.” Racialization began in earnest when European settlers colonized the Americas, instituted chattel slavery in the 1600s, and introduced legal justifications for racial stratification at the end of the 1700s. As documented by Ian Haney López, the United States used both the scientific rationale of its time in tandem with commonsense understandings of race by the 1920s. For instance, in the 1922 Supreme Court case Takao Ozawa v. United States, a Japanese man's pursuit of U.S. citizenship was struck down with the Court reasoning that although Ozawa might be culturally more American (meaning White) than most recent White immigrants, he was not Caucasian because Japan was not a nation that fell under the “scientific” category of Whiteness. A half year later, and originally granted naturalization by the district courts in 1920, Bhagat Singh Thind's citizenship based on his identity links to the Caucasus Mountains region, was appealed by the U.S. federal government, thereby deploying the scientific rationale that thwarted Ozawa. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Thind by favoring the commonsense law of race, such that anyone would “reasonably” conclude that Thind was not White. So although he may be scientifically Caucasian, he was certainly not commonsensically White. The opinion for both Ozawa and Thind was written by the same Supreme Court Justice, George Sutherland. In 1954, Pete Hernandez, a Mexican defendant, argued against the state of Texas that his murder case was unfairly tried because of an all-White jury. As George Martinez recounts it, the court rejected the appeal based on the idea that Mexicans could be considered White. Therefore, he was indeed judged by his peers. In all three cases, different portraits of racialization are evident.

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