Who is black? One nation's definition

Abstract

The way a person gets defined as black in the United States has occasionally been the subject of fiction, such as Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis ort Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, and also of portions of biographies or essays, but nonfiction treatments of how the definition developed, and of its implications and consequences, are rare and generally quite brief. And seldom has this topic been emphasized in scholarly research and writing on race relations, black history, or civil rights. It has certainly been unusual to stress that other countries define who is black in different ways, or that we define no other ethnic population as we do blacks. The present effort, written for the general reader as well as for scholars, is the first book-length treatment of the subject.My aim has been to write a book that is objective, that is based on what we know about race relations and that points up the problems and policy issues related to defining who is black. Many observers have...