Danielle Olden joins the Tanner Humanities Center with her book “Racial Uncertainties” and race in America.
Danielle Olden is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. She received her Ph.D. in modern U.S. history at Ohio State University in 2013. She currently is at work on her first book, “Racial Uncertainties: Mexican Americans, School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Post-Civil Rights America.” Her publications have appeared in Western Historical Quarterly and Qualitative Inquiry, as well as the forthcoming volume Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West (edited by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell). Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Utah Tanner Humanities Center, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, and the Ohio State University Graduate School, among others.
Mexican American racial uncertainty has long been a defining feature of U.S. racial understanding. Were Mexican Americans white or nonwhite? In the post-civil rights period, this racial uncertainty took on new meaning as the courts, the federal bureaucracy, local school officials, parents, and community activists sought to turn Mexican American racial identity to their own benefit. This is the first book that examines the pivotal 1973 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 Supreme Court ruling, and how debates over Mexican Americans’ racial position helped reinforce the emerging tropes of colorblind racial ideology. In the post-civil rights era, when overt racism was no longer socially acceptable, anti-integration voices utilized the indeterminacy of Mexican American racial identity to frame their opposition to school desegregation. That some Mexican Americans adopted these tropes only reinforced the strength of colorblindness in battles against civil rights in the 1970s.
