What Blood Won’t Tell is honored
USC Law Prof. Ariela Gross has won three prestigious awards for her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, which chronicles racial identity trials in American courts.
The awards include the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award, the James Willard Hurst, Jr. Prize and the American Political Science Association's award for the best book on Race, Ethnicity and Politics.
“I am so grateful that What Blood Won’t Tell has been awarded these esteemed prizes,” Gross said. “I’m especially honored that such diverse organizations – not only my colleagues in legal history but political scientists and non-academics – have recognized the book.”
What Blood Won’t Tell (Harvard University Press, 2008) recounts stories of racial identity trials in American courts, from the early republic well into the 20th century. Racial identity trials – court cases that determined a person’s “race” as well as their rights and privileges – help explain the history of race and racism in America, Gross said.
“We tend to believe race is a fact of nature, a property of blood, that we know it when we see it,” said Gross. “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.”
The Lillian Smith Book Award recognizes authors whose books demonstrate outstanding “literary merit and moral vision” and “an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.” It is sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries and the DeKalb County Public Library/Georgia Center.
The Hurst Prize is given annually for the best work in sociolegal history and the committee seeks studies in legal history that explore the relationship between law and society. The last prize is given by the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity and Politics for the best book on race and politics published in 2008.
In honoring Gross, the Lillian Smith Award nomination committee wrote: “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, ‘non-white’ (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.”
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