The English explorer Sir Francis Drake arrived in the San Francisco bay on June 5, 1579 bearing characteristic, eventually parodic markers of modern European civilization. Ignoring the names given to the region by its Miwok Indian inhabitants, Drake declared it Nova Albion (“New England”) because the bay's chalk-white cliffs reminded him of the famous white cliffs of Dover. After less than a day spent communicating “by signs” with the local people, Drake was self-satisfied on multiple fronts. He had clothed their naked, “savage” bodies; offered to them the sacred word of his Christian God (by which they were “greatly affected”); and, most importantly, secured from the Miwok king the “right and title of the whole land,” turning the Miwok people themselves into subjects of the British Crown. Drake memorialized his triumphant day by planting in the California soil a “plate, nailed upon a fair great post, whereupon was engraved her Majesty's name, the day and year of our arrival there, with the free giving up of the province and people into her Majesty's hands.” He then set sail, leaving behind, we can imagine with the benefit of hindsight, a bemused Miwok people (Reference GunnGunn 1994: 75–77). True: the seamless weaving of the modern discourses of religion, race, and rights according to which Drake's conquest was consecrated was, as the contemporary British comedian Eddie Izzard has it, unrelentingly absurd and even self-parodic. But, as Eve-Darian Smith's Religion, Race, and Rights persuasively argues, that weaving was neither unprecedented nor has it been played with any regularity for comic effect: the prerogatives of modern European civilization, well entrenched in colonial practice a century before Drake's arrival in California and always partially legal in character, have transformed the world in frequently brutal ways.
Darian-Smith's book canvasses the entire span of modern times and is organized chronologically, in three parts, around rich and provocative examinations of eight “legal landmarks”—broadly legal events, sometimes court cases, that illustrate prominent moments in the tangled history of religion, race, and rights. Darian-Smith presents the first of these legal landmarks—Martin Luther's 1517 posting of the “95 Theses” of protest against the Vatican on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany—in a manner representative of the book's method: Luther's protestation amounts to a historical condensation point in which key transformations in matters spiritual, racial, and legal coalesce and become apparent. Luther's intellectual revolution yoked anti-hierarchical Christianity to ethical citizenship and, eventually, to a new, proto-democratic vision of the proper relations between governments and citizens in which reigned the new logic of natural and individual rights. But even here, at the conceptual founding of modern times, Darian-Smith emphasizes the racial and religious inflections of the discourses surrounding citizenship and individual rights: these new rights were viewed as the rights of white Protestant Christians who were capable of, and ethically required to engage in, regular acts of self-governance that supposedly distinguished them from Catholics, Muslims, and other non-Christian and non-white heathens (such as the peoples who inhabited the newly “discovered” Americas). Here, as in all of Darian-Smith's examinations, we thus see how “the ebb and flow of religious practices, fluctuating racial tolerances, and the emerging idea of a rights-bearing individual are overlapping constitutive forces that together shape and have been shaped by legal processes” (pp. 4–5).
Dedicated to tracing this triangular, dynamic, and thoroughly modern relationship between religion, race, and rights, Darian-Smith provides non-derivative studies of well-known historical events. The book, accordingly, explores: the beheading of Charles I; the elaboration of liberal natural rights doctrine by Thomas Paine; the Morant Bay ex-slave riot of 1865; the Chicago Haymarket bombing; the Indian Allotment (“Dawes”) Act; prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg following World War II and the emerging human rights doctrine that those prosecutions portended; and, finally, contemporary articulations between neo-liberal economic prerogatives and the “War on Terror.” Each of these studies effectively shows how “law functions as the central axis around which discourses of religion, race, and rights circulate, crystallize as ideological concepts, and become institutionalized through the … agencies of the state” (p. 5).
As Darian-Smith acknowledges, one could view her case selection as idiosyncratic or only partially representative of the modern times with which she is concerned. However, the studies themselves are rich enough to support the author's selections, as they consistently offer persuasive insight into the relationships between religion, race, and rights. This would, in any event, be minor criticism for a book that has many virtues: it is provocative, insightful, conceptually sophisticated, comprehensive, and accessible enough for classroom use.
Religion, Race, and Rights is an important entry in the law and society tradition. It is a skillful affirmation of the centrality and interconnectedness of the discourses of religion, race, and rights both for the promoters of European modernity, like Sir Frances Drake, and for the rest of us, who live in the “New,” globalized world that continues to bear their marks.
