Race: a legal, historical, scientific, and personal issue.

• Author: Bonventre, Vincent Martin
• Position: INTRODUCTION

Welcome and good morning.

To all of our guests, welcome to Albany Law School and to the law school community. It is good to have you here for our annual Albany Law Review symposium. As some of you may be aware, the Albany Law Review is the oldest student law journal in the country. (1) Among the things that distinguish the Albany Law Review are these symposia. We have had some truly exceptional ones over the past several years. Recent symposia have focused on torture; cloning; the concept of violence in international law; the use of foreign law in domestic courts; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights; issues facing the judiciary; and free exercise of religion as a second-class constitutional right. (2) Under the sponsorship of our annual State Constitutional Commentary issue, we have held additional symposia the last couple of years. One brought together some of the most prominent state chief justices from around the country, and last year we hosted the entire New York Court of Appeals. (3)

The focus today is on race--"Defining Race." For organizing this symposium, we have to thank Dan Bresler, this year's Symposium Editor for the law review, and Brian Borie, the Editor-in-Chief. Together with Albany Law Professor Anthony Farley, they are responsible for putting the symposium together. What is additionally special about this year's symposium is that the law review is sponsoring it jointly with the law school's Journal of Science and Technology. Bill Lowe, the Editor-in-Chief of that journal, and Rebecca Solomon, its Symposium Editor, have been particularly helpful with this event.

Let me say something about the genesis of this symposium. Bill Lowe--again, the EIC of the Tech Journal--had approached me last year about supervising his note for the journal. We kicked around a few ideas and ultimately landed on his writing about the meaning of race. He did a superb job, by the way, and his topic and paper became the inspiration for today's symposium.

Race. It is a subject that has long been a particular matter of fascination, confusion, curiosity, and ambivalence for me personally. It has been so for members of my family. Indeed, even for my children at a very young age.

In February of 1995, Newsweek magazine did a cover story entitled "What Color is Black?" (4) The cover itself was a montage of sixteen different faces of African-Americans, representing a wide range of different shades of skin. When my copy of that issue arrived, I showed my three sons. I asked my six-year old at the time, "Which one of these is us?" He pointed to a face that was somewhere midway between the darkest and the lightest-skinned. The other two boys followed suit. My eight-year old at the time then said, "You know, Dad, the black people hate the white people. The white people hate the black people. Does that mean that everybody hates us?"

As for my ten-year old at the time, he had simply assumed that he was black--like his cousins, my sister's children. (My brother-in-law is Haitian.) My son's mother, my ex-wife, wanted me to disabuse him, to correct his insistence that he was black. Well, I had no interest in doing so. One reason was my concern about the possible implication, that there was some reason we wouldn't want to be black. In any event, my children's own confusion or ambivalence about race likely reflected my own.

I am Italian-American. More specifically, Sicilian-American. My ethnic heritage is clear. With regard to race, however, that has never been...