Americans Without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship

4. Culture, Personality, and Racial Liberalism

Culture, Personality, and Racial Liberalism Contractual juridical racialism rested not only on a political vision of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy, but also on theories of economic liberty ascendant at a particular stage in American capitalism. The Supreme Court’s economic substantive due process jurisprudence and Madison Grant’s anti-environmentalist model of racial-legal character were mutually supporting positions shaping the racial boundaries of American civic life. Yet neither view would sustain its cultural and legal dominance and, indeed, they would fall together at midcentury. Economically , the jurisprudence of contractual liberty that Justice Sutherland expressed so forcefully against the views of Louis D. Brandeis in cases such as Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) would not survive the 1930s.1 By the time the United States entered the postwar period under discussion in this chapter, the Lochner era had long given way under the pressures of social and governmental need. American capitalism after the New Deal would be characterized instead by nationally regulated markets, corporate economic dominance, and high-growth consumer society. At the same time, racial beliefs like those Grant advanced in The Passing of the Great Race, from his particular claims that Jews and Asians were ratlike people who thrived off the filth of society to his generally hereditarian perspective on social difference, would buckle beneath the assault, among others, of American state mobilization against Nazism. While there still are meaningful bars to full civic membership for minority groups in the United States today, an explicitly geneticist approach to social differences has been almost entirely displaced in public discourse; in its stead, Americans across the political spectrum adhere to an essentially Boasian view of the centrality of culture to human variation. 4 107 In this chapter, I explore the significance for juridical racialism of this dual transformation and its emergence within the Afro-American struggle for civil rights. I focus my attention on the Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that racial segregation in public schools per se violates the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws, overturning the separate-but-equal doctrine enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).2 My interest in Brown centers specifically on its eleventh footnote, in which the Court controversially cited a body of social scientific research concerning Afro-American selfesteem , most notably Kenneth B. Clark’s “doll studies,” that were based on views about law, self, and society advanced by Boasian scholars in the culture-and-personality school of anthropology.3 The citation of this scholarship illustrates the psychological inflection with which the culture concept transformed modern approaches to citizenship—one recapitulated , I argue, in the argumentative structure of the Brown decision as a whole. Note eleven also prominently cited the most important midcentury study of race relations in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), and before turning to Brown I examine the life and work of its author, economist Gunnar Myrdal, who also played a significant role in forging the liberal intellectual consensus that would implement the social ideals Brown expressed.4 Like the Court’s opinion in Brown, I argue, An American Dilemma traced the psychological and socio-legal pathologies of American life to an ontological state of legal self-contradiction, and it sought to remedy those pathologies not only through the linked establishment of jurisprudential and psycho-social equilibrium, but also through the symbolic integration of the self and the machinery of federal government, the self and the national state. This approach to civic life, I argue, which brought the tradition of juridical racialism to an end through its final expression, was an essential ideological component of postwar economic modernization. The Court’s citation of social science in Brown has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate. Speaking broadly, this debate concerns the extent to which footnote eleven was “necessary” for the logic of the opinion and thus the extent to which the Court can be said to have fundamentally “relied” on social science in its argument.5 Scholars tend to address this question in one of two ways. Some claim the Court relied heavily on social science and that its opinion is an important manifestation of the jurisprudential victory of legal realism after the New Deal. Ironically, such scholars tend to be among the decision’s staunchest crit108 | Culture, Personality, and Racial Liberalism ics, and they frequently couple their characterization of...