{"product_id":"9780814724866","title":"Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans","description":"No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were \u003cem\u003egens de couleur libre\u003c\/em\u003e, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color.      Much of the recent scholarship on New Orleans examines \u003cem\u003ewhat\u003c\/em\u003e race relations in the antebellum period looked as well as \u003cem\u003ewhy\u003c\/em\u003e antebellum Louisiana’s \u003cem\u003egens de couleur\u003c\/em\u003e enjoyed rights and privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the \u003cem\u003ewhat\u003c\/em\u003e and\u003cem\u003e why\u003c\/em\u003e questions than with how people of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond their control. As its title suggests, \u003cem\u003eMaking Race in the Courtroom\u003c\/em\u003e argues that race is best understood not as a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role of free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.","brand":"New York University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47118612398320,"sku":"9780814724866","price":49.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780814724866_p0.jpg?v=1763747493","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780814724866","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}