Race and Law, and constructing whiteness

Although nearly a decade old, "Litigating Whiteness," (available in JSTOR) by Ariela Gross offers up some intriguing observations about the all-important question of race before the southern courts during the antebellum era. How was race constructed? Gross argues that antebellum southerners, with no scientific means of figuring out what constituted "black" or "white," relied on evidence of the "performance" of whiteness to distill biological essentialism.