How do institutions construct race?
Early on, who could serve on a jury in the United States? The courts ruled that blacks and Indians could not serve on the jury. So, you had an institutional practice, and it didn’t depend on individual identity. Someone labeled someone else as black or white, and then institutions created certain responses to that. A lot of people don’t realize that one of the reasons we have an electoral college and one of the ways it was set up was to protect slave states. It gave slave states more voting power; it counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. We forget that slavery is not something that just impacted the South, it impacted the whole country. Also, slavery was limited to blacks, so it became very important how you were categorized. And the presumption in this country for many years was that blacks were not free, even if you lived in a non-slave state. Certain rights were associated with certain people, and the institutions reflected those rights. Many of the structures and institutions
