The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas'
Robert J. Cottrol

This paper examines the Afro-Latin experience as a way to better inform our study of racial hierarchy and identity in the United States. Little more than a generation ago, such an inquiry would have brought forth ready answers concerning the rigidity and caste like nature of the American racial hierarchy. This would have been contrasted with the fluid, class like nature of black-white stratification in Latin America. The law of race and slavery would also be seen as having played a considerable role in the development of two significantly different cultures of race relations and racial hierarchy. The United States had the more rigid and systematic application of discriminatory racial law both in slavery and in the post-emancipation periods. The United States was home to the "one drop rule" that deemed a person black if the individual had any traceable African ancestry. By way of contrast racial discrimination in Latin American seemed considerably less severe, a point made famous in the 1940s by sociologist Frank Tannenbaum.

Today in the wake of the US Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s much has changed. Black activists in Latin America routinely express dissatisfaction with the pace of racial progress in their nations, often comparing such unfavorably with civil rights developments in the United States. This paper will discuss these parallel histories in North and Latin American societies. One point that will be of particular concern in the paper is how the American liberal legal and constitutional order contributed to both the harsher and more rigid system of racial stratification that historically existed in the United States and how that liberal order also helped produce a more thorough Civil Rights revolution.