Daedalus articles from January 2005

Daedalus archives from January 2005

Racial classification in America: where do we go from here?
January 1, 2005... In its first national census, the young American republic not only counted its population; it racially classified it. (1) From 1790 to 1990, the nation's demographic base changed from one decennial census to the next, and so too did the racial...

The one drop rule & the one hate rule.
January 1, 2005... Two portentous practices within the public discussion of 'race' in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together. One is the method by which we decide which individuals are 'black.' The other is our habit of conflating...

Race, law & history: the Supreme Court from "Dred Scott" to "Grutter v. Bollinger".
January 1, 2005... I start from two points of departure: The first I draw from the contrasting contentions of counsel in a redistricting case argued in the Supreme Court in 1976. (1) The case addressed the validity of a 1974 New York statute that redrew state...

Race on the 2010 census: Hispanics & the shrinking white majority.
January 1, 2005... At our country's founding, we made race the constitutional test for those capable of self-government. Our nation's organic document allocated congressional seats among the states in proportion to "the whole Number of free Persons... excluding...

Multiracialism & the civil rights future.
January 1, 2005... Spurred by a small group of activists in the 1990s, the American system of racial classification changed recently in a conceptually bold way. With moving reference to the self-esteem of their children, along with the moral conviction that...

Ethnicity & the boundaries of race: rereading Directive 15.( Statistical Policy Directive No. 15)
January 1, 2005... Most of the racial and ethnic categories current in American life can be traced to an obscure government edict: Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, promulgated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on May 12, 1977. (1) Although the...

Looking ahead: racial trends in the United States.
January 1, 2005... In April of 2004, the quarterly newsletter Migration News summarized the most recent data on race and ethnicity from the U.S. Census Bureau: "In 2000, the racial/ethnic makeup of US residents was: White, 69 percent; Hispanic and Black, 13...

The myth of Latin American multiracialism.
January 1, 2005... Many Latin American nations have long proudly proclaimed a multiracial ideal: unlike the United States, countries like Brazil and Mexico have celebrated the mixing of races, and claimed to extend equal rights and opportunities to all citizens,...

Diverse republics: French & American responses to racial pluralism.
January 1, 2005... At first glance, a comparison of French and American responses to ethnic and racial diversity may seem arbitrary and unproductive. One response emerges from an old European country with more than a thousand years of continuous existence, the...

Why race still matters.
January 1, 2005... Why has race mattered in so many times and places? Why does it still matter? Put more precisely, why has there been such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race and to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds...

Inspissation.(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Definitions. Density. Conundrum. Condensation. Etymology. Abstraction and the hissing as of air escaping. And indeed, the atmosphere becomes so thick that vision fogs up like a windshield in the wet. Socked in: was this what the word...

The naked juror.(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... It was always the same: she received her summons in the mail, reported to the courthouse punctually on the given date, went through voir dire two or three times, failed to be picked as a juror, and was told her service was done. The whole...

Dialogue between Michel Foucault & Baqir Parham: on Marx, Islam, Christianity & revolution.(Interview)
January 1, 2005... Note by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson: In 1978, as the protests against the shah were becoming a mass movement, Michel Foucault made his first visit to Iran. During the next eight months, Foucault wrote a number of articles on the Iranian...

Shelley E. Taylor: on healthy illusions.
January 1, 2005... When people see news reports about survivors of traumatic events, they are often startled to hear them sound so upbeat--even grateful. "We all pulled together" and "I found out what is really important in life" are common themes. In interviews...

Philip L. Quinn: on religious diversity & tolerance.
January 1, 2005... Since September 11, 2001, the fragility of tolerance has become a source of acute anxiety in scholarly reflection on religion--as shown by some of the contributions to the Summer 2003 issue of Daedalus on secularism and religion. In that...