The Boundaries of Blackness

Chapter 5 examines struggles over inductees’ “proper” racial classification and placement in the segregated World War II–era US military. In millions of cases, classification was routine and uncontroversial. But in hundreds of cases—involving people who identified as everything from American Indian to Moorish American to white—men challenged their official race classification, or their placement in the segregated military, or both. The most heated and consequential of these challenges revolved around the meaning and membership of “colored” (a synonym for “Negro” or black)—not white. “Colored” people were by far the most thoroughly segregated and subjugated descent group in the US military, which meant that their race classification involved not just classification itself, but also assignment to “colored” outfits. Since membership in these outfits carried so many acute disadvantages, the stakes related to the “colored” category were unquestionably highest.

Do White People See Variation in Black Skin Tones? Reexamining a Purported Outgroup Homogeneity Effect

Previous research has reported that white survey interviewers remember black respondents’ skin tones in a much narrower range than recollections by black interviewers. This finding has been used to suggest that, in line with the one-drop rule, whites do not perceive meaningful differences between light- and dark-skinned black people. The authors reanalyze evidence thought to demonstrate relative homogeneity in white interviewers’ evaluation of black skin tones. In contrast to previous studies, this examination of several data sources reveals significant heterogeneity in the ratings assigned by white interviewers when taking into account the ordinal nature of the skin tone measures. The results are consistent with theories of social cognition that emphasize that beyond formal racial classification schemes, skin tone is used to implicitly categorize others along a continuum of “blackness.” The findings also align with research suggesting that rather than nullifying within-race skin tone, increases in white racism intensify white colorism.

Racializing Discourses of Illegality

This chapter analyzes how notions of race, religion, security, and language come together to distribute fear and instill suspicion into everyday life. In raising the question, “What Does a Terrorist Sound Like?” the chapter examines four cases of raciolinguistic profiling that associate specific words and languages with Muslims as security risks specifically within the domains of travel (“Travelling while Muslim”) and education (“Studying while Muslim”). It highlights how “Muslim” becomes a de facto racial classification, particularly when Muslim, or seemingly Muslim, bodies speak languages that appear deviant thereby causing insecurity among those in immediate proximity. The chapter concludes by urging scholars to further interrogate the white listening subjects—whether an individual on a plane, or government surveillance policies—that construct Muslims as illegible and always/already suspect, while they are often presumed innocent and their ignorance is left without scrutiny.

Machine Readable Race: Constructing Racial Information in the Third Reich

This paper examines how informational processing drove new structures of racial classification in the Third Reich. The Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (Dehomag) worked closely with the government in designing and integrating punch-card informational systems. As a German subsidiary of IBM, Dehomag’s technology was deployed initially for a census in order to provide a more detailed racial analysis of the population. However the racial data was not detailed enough. The Nuremberg Race Laws provided a more precise and procedural definition of Jewishness that could be rendered machine-readable. As the volume and velocity of information in the Reich increased, Dehomag’s technology was adopted by other agencies like the Race and Settlement Office, and culminated in the vision of a single machinic number for each citizen. Through the lens of these proto-technologies, the paper demonstrates the historical interplay between race and information. Yet if the indexing and sorting of race anticipates big-data analytics, contemporary power is more sophisticated and subtle. The complexity of modern algorithmic regimes diffuses obvious racial markers, engendering a racism without race.