These two recent books exemplify distinct approaches to the legacy of racism in the United States. In Race, Equality, and the Burdens of History, John Arthur, who died in January 2007 after completing it, pursues conceptual clarity. He aims “to elucidate core concepts like racism, race, racial equality, and merit”; at the same time, he appreciates that these concepts are not “unchanging realities existing outside history and human practices” (p. 6). White Enough to Be American? is more thoroughly historical. Lauren Basson uses four striking cases of people and territories perceived as “racially mixed” around the turn of the twentieth century to demonstrate “that constructed racial categories played a central role in defining the territorial boundaries of the [U.S.] state and the nation” (p. 2). Together, these fine books indicate the need for philosophical rigor as well as historical specificity to address adequately the political history of racism.

Arthur focuses on the legacy of antiblack racism in the United States. Although his specific claims are often debatable, he illuminates a number of topics: racism and racial profiling; the idea that race is a social construction; slavery; racial equality; the relationship between race and poverty; compensatory justice, affirmative action, and equal opportunity. He challenges “critical race theory” judiciously, with arguments for which those who approach racism in a more critical vein need good responses (pp. ix, 11–12).

Racism, Arthur notes, is a “normative concept” that entails “an evaluation as well as a description” (p. 12). He advances a middle-ground conception between the “essentially intentional” view that racism involves “an act of ‘unjust discrimination’ on the basis of race” and more systemic approaches that emphasize pervasive racism and hold “that institutions that do not result in equality of racial outcomes are, for that reason, racist” (p. 14). According to this author, racism is a negative “attitude toward persons in virtue of their race.” It takes a variety of forms but chiefly involves “racial contempt in the form of either hostility or indifference” (pp. 16, 14). While it “often brings oppression in its wake, racism can also, in theory, if not in fact, be completely benign in its effects” (p. 17).

Arthur's notion of institutional racism is suggestive but retains the limitations of an individualistic account of racism. This is evident in his passing reference to the possibility of “a racist hermit” whose racism would have no practical impact, and when he dismisses quickly the view that “equate[s] institutional racism with differences in outcome” (pp. 17, 30–31). Categorizing institutional racism “as an interpretive concept,” he says that we should “first personify the [relevant] institution, imagining what it has done to be the action of a single agent that can have attitudes, and then … ask whether the institution's action is a reflection of racism” (p. 33, Arthur's emphasis). While he acknowledges that racism can flourish without intentional racists, he underplays how racism produces structured social and political inequalities.

Regarding race, Arthur resists the idea that it is merely a social construction—a significant social and political mode of identity and difference but not a meaningful biological concept. He steers a course between those who reject any consideration of a “biological basis of race” and racists who appeal to “racial differences to defend policies and practices that are incompatible with racial equality” (p. 52). Against the social constructionist view, he cites a major study published in Science in 2002. Researchers found “genetic variations among five population groups sufficient to identify the ancestry of each human being,” even though up to 95% of human genetic diversity occurs within these population groups (p. 73). As he says, “the next question is whether it is correct to refer to these groups as ‘races’” (p. 75). He concludes that the notion of “continental races [is] important to a full biological understanding of human beings” but “provide[s] no support … for racism” (pp. 75, 82).

This discussion raises more questions than it resolves. Arthur says that the continental population groups “track fairly closely what have been traditionally understood as races” (p. 83). Yet he does not consider adequately the shifting character of “traditional” racial categories. Moreover, he does not explain why we should hold onto the problematic term race, understood in the biological sense, to speak of populations that differ from each other merely in terms of certain gene frequencies in relation to overwhelming genetic similarity. In offering an account of race and racism “that matches accepted usage” (p. 88), he elides a point that Basson highlights: how “accepted usage” concerning these concepts has been shaped by prevailing inequalities of power between groups. This calls for a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Arthur's discussions of racial equality and affirmative action exhibit similar strengths and limitations. To achieve racial equality, he defends a strong conception of equality of opportunity in place of affirmative action policies (pp. 137, 289–95). He rests his position, however, largely on his understanding of racial equality as equal opportunity for all individuals, rather than “equality of outcome” across racialized groups (pp. 146, 286, 290). He contrasts widespread opposition to affirmative action to widespread support for equal opportunity (p. 267); but he does not consider sufficiently the widespread opposition in the United States to redistributive policies that are needed to achieve the kind of substantive equality of opportunity he favors, for instance, with respect to public education.

Basson's book contributes to the scholarship on American political development, critical whiteness studies, and debates about “mixed race” identities. Basson examines how constructed racial categories shaped “eligibility for membership in the nation and state” (p. 4). She challenges the “methodological nationalism” of social scientists who pay insufficient attention to “the ‘symbiotic relationship’ between the modern state and the ‘nationalist political project’” (p. 182); and her “state in society” approach focuses “on both territorial and sociological border zones as intersections where crucial processes in the defining of nations and states occur” (p. 4). This yields a novel perspective on the political economy of shifting U.S. racial categories in struggles over colonial expansion, land, labor, and citizenship. Simultaneously, she challenges Rogers Smith's influential account of “multiple traditions” in the United States—liberal, republican, and ascriptive—and supports the more troubling view that “liberal, republican, and ascriptive strands” have been “inextricably intertwined” (p. 178).

While some repetitiveness undercuts the force of her arguments, Basson compellingly tracks efforts by the country's white European American majority to equate American national identity with unadulterated racial whiteness. White Americans regarded various “mixed-race” Americans as threats to white Americanness. A central thread of her analysis concerns the racialized and gendered character of debates about the “fitness” for self-government of different persons and places. The white men who wielded political power generally presumed that white persons (or at least white men) were fit for self-government but that nonwhite persons, including “mixed-raced” persons, typically were unfit. They extended this view of racial fitness to regions with substantial nonwhite populations, such as Hawaii and the homeland of the Métis—a people of European (primarily French) and Native American descent—in the Northwest Territories (pp. 21–25, 181–84).

One case study involves Métis leader Louis Riel. Reil was born in a Métis settlement in Canada's Northwest Territories, became a U.S. citizen, pushed for the United States to annex the Northwest Territories, and was executed for treason after he returned there and led an armed uprising against the new Canadian Dominion (p. 66). He challenged exclusionary U.S. politics in two ways: insisting “that the U.S. nation include him as a member despite his status as a nonwhite, non-Anglo, non-Protestant, indigenous person of mixed-descent”; and demanding “that the U.S. state expand its borders to include the historical Métis homeland” (p. 78).

While the United States refused to annex the Northwest Territories, it did annex Hawaii, another “mixed-race” territory that, in contrast to the Northwest Territories, was also located outside the continental United States. The annexation of Hawaii, Basson explains, was due to fears of Japanese domination of Hawaii and to the political, economic, and cultural dominance in Hawaii of a minority “white elite of U.S. descent” (p. 95). She explores the public debate over the annexation and Hawaii's fitness for self-government through the case of Robert Wilcox, a Hawaiian leader of mixed European-American and indigenous Hawaiian descent.

Finally, Basson offers another angle with the case of Lucy Parsons, a U.S.-born leader of the late-nineteenth-century anarchist movement who identified as an indigenous American of Mexican and Indian descent. In this era of industrialization and class conflict, U.S. political elites defined American and “Americanism” ideologically in relation to what they deemed the “un-American” ideologies of anarchism and socialism (pp. 143, 157, 164–66). “To be American became increasingly intertwined with buying into the ideology of capitalism.” It encompassed notions of private property and “consumption of the goods that capitalism produced,” as well as such “ascriptive traits as whiteness” (p. 166). Parsons challenged the norm of white Americanness and appealed to her indigenous American identity to rebut the alleged foreignness of anarchist ideas (p. 167). She critiqued capitalism, however, “from within the racist and sexist parameters of the prevailing discourse of civilization” (p. 175).

To protect the purity of state and nation from radical political ideologies that emerged in U.S. cities from “mixed, working-class populations of predominantly European nationalities,” governing elites sought to strip “away the privileges of whiteness from those whose political beliefs were considered un-American” (p. 143). Here, Basson skips over a complicating factor: the concurrent fragmentation of a pan-European white racial identity. As millions of new immigrants came to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, dominant “Nordic” and “Anglo-Saxon” elites defined the new immigrants as “lesser” white races. Whiteness mutated accordingly (see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, 1999).

Overall, Arthur's book sheds light on several key conceptual issues that scholars and citizens must navigate to repair the legacy of racism in the United States, particularly the deep history of antiblack racism. He highlights the need for studies of racism to be conceptually lucid as well as historically informed, even though he tends to reinstate a somewhat limited black–white racial binary. Basson's book makes a more emphatic case for taking history seriously in order to understand adequately the role of ideas about race and racism in the political development of the United States. She fills out the black cultural critic Albert Murray's insight into the thoroughly “mulatto” character of American culture. While ideas about a racially “pure” white American nation were never credible, Basson shows that a majoritarian politics of white Americanism powerfully shaped the U.S. state and nation. She shows, moreover, that at the turn of the twentieth century, the white American majority, while hardly homogeneous, advanced this project in part through racially exclusionary policies brandished against “mixed race” persons and territories.