Technology and the Logic of American Racism

Download or read book Technology and the Logic of American Racism written by Sarah E. Chinn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Sarah E. Chinn pulls together what seems to be opposite discourses--the information-driven languages of law and medicine and the subjective logics of racism--to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over the past century. She examines a range of primary social case studies such as the American Red Cross' lamentable decision to segregate the blood of black and white donors during World War II, and its ramifications for American culture, and more recent examples that reveal the racist nature of criminology, such as the recent trial of O.J. Simpson. Among several key American literary texts, she looks at Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel whose plot turns on issues of racial identity and which was written at a time when scientific and popular interest in evidence of the body, such as fingerprinting, was at a peak.