Prof. Gross Wins 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award

<p>&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Her work, What Blood Won't Tell, is recognized &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;USC Law Professor Ariela Gross has won the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award for her work, &lt;em&gt;What &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; Won&amp;rsquo;t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries and &lt;br /&gt; DeKalb County Public Library/Georgia Center for the Book, the Lillian Smith Book Award recognizes authors whose books demonstrate outstanding &amp;ldquo;literary merit and moral vision&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.&amp;rdquo;&lt;br /&gt; .&lt;br /&gt; Gross shares the award with the authors of &lt;em&gt;The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;quot;I'm honored that my book was recognized as making a contribution to the struggle for racial justice and understanding in the South, and especially to be associated with the legacy of Lillian Smith, whose novels helped awaken white Southerners to the injustice of Jim Crow,&amp;rdquo; Gross said.&amp;nbsp; &amp;ldquo;It's also a special honor to be recognized together with Bob Zellner, one of my civil rights heroes.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In What Blood Won&amp;rsquo;t Tell &lt;/em&gt;(Harvard University Press, 2008), Gross recounts stories of racial identity trials in American courts, from the early republic well into the 20th century. Racial identity trials &amp;ndash; court cases that determined a person&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;race&amp;rdquo; as well as their rights and privileges &amp;ndash; help explain the history of race and racism in America, Gross said.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;ldquo;We tend to believe race is a fact of nature, a property of blood, that we know it when we see it,&amp;rdquo; said Gross.&amp;nbsp; &amp;ldquo;But race is a powerful ideology that came into being and changed forms at particular historical moments as the product of social, economic, and psychological conditions.&amp;nbsp; Fundamental to race is a hierarchy of power, and this story is about determining racial identity for particular purposes:&amp;nbsp; enslaving some people to free others; taking land from some to give to others; robbing people of their dignity to give others a sense of supremacy.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In August, Gross won the annual James Willard Hurst, Jr. Prize for &lt;em&gt;What Blood Won&amp;rsquo;t Tell. &lt;/em&gt;The Hurst Prize is given annually for the best work in sociolegal history and seeks studies in legal history that explore the relationship between law and society.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In honoring Gross, the Lillian Smith Award nomination committee wrote: &amp;ldquo;Gross supplies a specific accounting of the contortions into which communities and the courts tangled themselves while trying to figure out who was really white or black, or something else. And she looks at the consequences of this thinking, how it divided a nation into black, &amp;quot;non-white&amp;quot; (Native Americans and immigrant groups that didn't come from Europe), and white - the people my grandmother and so many others refer to as, simply, Americans.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Gross will receive the award in September at a ceremony at the Dekalb Public Library in Georgia.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;</p>