Talk:Judicial aspects of race in the United States

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[edit] The Indian Removal Act

The following part of a sentence in the article uses a choice of words that should be improved, because it's very misleading: "The Indian Removal Act of 1830 legalized deportation of Native Americans to the West, known as 'Indian Removal'(...)"

First, "deportation" isn't the best word to use here. Deportation is most often defined as "the expulsion of an undesired alien from a country." Merriam Websters defines it as "the removal from a country of an alien whose presence is illegal or detrimental to the public welfare." Second, when the word deportation is used here followed by the vague location "to the West," and furthermore with the word "West" being capitalized, it gives the completely wrong idea. I would recommend that the word "deportation" be replaced with "relocation" and "to the West" be replaced with "to the west of the Mississippi River."

[edit] Suggestions for Improving Article

A good start! I really welcome this article for laying out the interconnections between immigration law, the laws surrounding Native Americans, slavery and the lives of free blacks, and the later Jim Crow laws.

Some suggestions for further research: check out the work of Peggy Pascoe ("Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth Century America"), David Hollinger ("Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States") and Patrick Wolfe ("Land, Labour, and Difference: Elementerary Structures of Race").

195.73.22.130 21:04, 26 June 2007 (UTC)