Mixed Race Studies

Multiracials and Civil Rights – Book Talk with Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández

Columbia Law School
Jerome Greene Hall
Room TBD
435 West 116th Street
New York, New York 10027
2018-09-12, 12:10-13:15 EDT (Local Time)

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law

A Lunchtime Talk hosted by the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture

As the mixed-race population in the United States grows, public fascination with multiracial identity has promoted the belief that racial mixture will destroy racism. However, multiracial people still face discrimination. Many legal scholars hold that this is distinct from the discrimination faced by people of other races, and traditional civil rights laws built on a strict black/white binary need to be reformed to account for cases of discrimination against those identifying as mixed-race. In Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, Tanya Katerí Hernández debunks this idea and draws on a plethora of court cases to demonstrate that multiracials face the same types of discrimination as other racial groups. Hernández argues that multiracial people are primarily targeted for discrimination due to their non-whiteness, and shows how the cases highlight the need to support the existing legal structures instead of a new understanding of civil rights law. The legal and political analysis is enriched with Hernández’s own personal narrative as a mixed-race Afro-Latina. Coming at a time when explicit racism is resurfacing, Hernández’s look at multiracial discrimination cases is essential for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against non-whites, and has much to teach us about how to move towards a more egalitarian society.

Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination [Review]

new york journal of books
2018-08-27

L. Ali Khan, Professor of Law
Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (New York: New York University Press, 2018)

“General readers, with no initiation in law, will learn quite a bit about racial discrimination, civil rights laws, and how academics grapple with theoretical difficulties underlying race relations in the realm of law.”

In Multiracials and Civil Rights, Fordham law professor Tanya Hernández demonstrates that discrimination perpetrated against blacks also targets mixed-race persons, called multiracials. Contrary to popular expectations, multiracialism has not alleviated racism. Deviations from the hundred-percent whiteness (a racial myth) continue to inform social constructions of race, racial awareness, discrimination, and the application of civil rights laws.

Historically, the one-drop rule has required that a person with any degree of black ancestry must identify solely as black. With diverse immigration and interracial procreation, multiracialism is on the rise. Since 2000, multiracials are free to identify with more than one race. Yet such is the sociology of racism that any fraction of blackness, visible or hidden, reduces multiracials into black persons, discounting their other racial traits.

The hundred-percent whiteness paradigm formulates and protects the white privilege, a source of unearned advantage, and offers measly concessions to any dilution of whiteness. Therefore, non-whiteness is potentially subject to racial discrimination actionable under law…

Read the entire review here.

Tanya Katerí Hernández’s “Multiracials and Civil Rights”

The Page 99 Test
2018-08-08

Marshal Zeringue

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she co-directs the Center on Race, Law & Justice as its Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is like some numerical sorcery from a Jorge Luis Borges story, mythical and unfathomable yet accurate all at the same time. On page 99 of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, I describe how the U.S. government refused to add a “multiracial” category to its list of racial categories on the decennial census form in 1997, and instead started permitting respondents to select as many racial categories apply to their racial identity. The page then notes that the most zealous of multiracial category proponents were not satisfied by this government method of enumerating the population of racially mixed residents “because multiple box checking does not directly promote a distinct multiracial identity.” Page 99’s insight into the entire book though is revealed in the assessment that the significance of the census racial category debate:

extends beyond the actual decision of how mixed-race persons should be counted. What is most salient is how the struggles over the census racial categories have fostered a discourse of exalting personal racial identity and characterizing any incursions on expressions of personal identity as a civil rights issue in of itself absent any mixed-race specific material inequality.

Read the entire article here.

Discussion on Race and Identity: One Year After Charlottesville

C-SPAN
Mississippi Book Festival
Jackson, Mississippi
2018-08-18

Chris Goodwin, Introduction
Programs and Communication Division
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi

W. Ralph Eubanks, Moderator and Visiting Professor of English & Southern Studies
University of Mississippi

Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Sheryll Cashin, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Jabari Asim, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for Creative Writing
Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts

Authors Imani Perry, Sheryll Cashin, and Jabari Asim discuss race and identity.

Watch the entire discussion (00:56:15) here.

Tanya Katerí Hernández

Writers Read
2018-08-09

Marshal Zeringue

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she co-directs the Center on Race, Law & Justice as its Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives.

Her new book is Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.

Recently I asked Hernández about what she was reading. Her reply:

I have been re-reading Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, in anticipation of the film version that Lupita Nyongo is slated to star in portraying Noah’s mother. The book has a special resonance for me as a comparative-race law scholar whose personal background as a black-identified mixed-race Afro-Latina traveling the globe informs her insights about the (in)significance of the growth of racial mixture to the pursuit of racial equality whether it be in the US, South Africa, or Latin America. Noah’s story of being mixed-race during and after apartheid ended in South Africa is both a poignant and humorous read (as you would expect from the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show)…

Read the entire interview here.

Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination

New York University Press
2018-08-03
224 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781479830329

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law, New York, New York

Narratives of mixed-race people bringing claims of racial discrimination in court, illuminating traditional understandings of civil rights law

As the mixed-race population in the United States grows, public fascination with multiracial identity has promoted the belief that racial mixture will destroy racism. However, multiracial people still face discrimination. Many legal scholars hold that this is distinct from the discrimination faced by people of other races, and traditional civil rights laws built on a strict black/white binary need to be reformed to account for cases of discrimination against those identifying as mixed-race.

In Multiracials and Civil Rights, Tanya Katerí Hernández debunks this idea, and draws on a plethora of court cases to demonstrate that multiracials face the same types of discrimination as other racial groups. Hernández argues that multiracial people are primarily targeted for discrimination due to their non-whiteness, and shows how the cases highlight the need to support the existing legal structures instead of a new understanding of civil rights law.

Coming at a time when explicit racism is resurfacing, Hernández’s look at multiracial discrimination cases is essential for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against non-whites, and has much to teach us about how to move towards a more egalitarian society.

Octavia Spencer, Queen Latifah To Bring Racially Charged ‘The Rhinelander Affair’ To Screen With Zero Gravity

Deadline Hollywood
2018-07-23

Anita Busch

REX/Shutterstock

EXCLUSIVE: It’s a great story that delves into the caste system, racism and sexism. The Rhinelander Affair, written by William Kinsolving, follows the controversial 1925 divorce trial in New York involving a man from an upper-class New Rochelle family who married a bi-racial, working-class woman. It is a ripped from the headlines story from the 1920s with many meaty roles in what was a roller coaster ride about money, love, racism and betrayal.

The project is now being produced for the big screen by Mark and Christine Holder (who found the story), Octavia Spencer, Queen Latifah and Shakim Compere’s Flavor Unit Entertainment and Dave Broome (The Day I Met El Chapo). The Kingsolving manuscript, repped by Trident, is going out to publishers this summer.

Alice Jones and Leonard (Kip) Rhinelander

The story revolves around Leonard Rhinelander and Alice Jones, who fell in love (she was 22 and he 18), and then were kept apart by Rhinelander’s family. However, they married in secret before it spilled into the papers and stayed that way for three years. At issue was whether Jones duped Leonard into marrying her by hiding the fact that she was bi-racial (she was the daughter of an English woman and an English-West Indian taxi driver). Leonard stood by Alice under intense media scrutiny until pressures — both internally with the family and externally — caused them to divorce…

Read the entire article here.

Do We Still Need Constitutional “Equal Protection” in a Growing Multiracial World?

Medium
2018-07-09

Tanya Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law; Associate Director Center on Race, Law & Justice
Fordham University School of Law

Tanya Hernández is the author of the forthcoming book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination from New York University Press.

Reflections on the the 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment

July 9th, marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s equality principle of the U.S. Constitution. Does the pursuit of racial equality look different 150 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s equality principle in today’s growing multiracial world? In 2010, 9 million people constituting 2.9 percent of the population selected two or more races on the census. The Census Bureau projects that the self-identified multiracial population will triple by 2060. Yet, in my own exhaustive review of discrimination cases in a variety of contexts like the workplace, educational settings, housing rentals, access to public accommodations, jury service, and the criminal justices system, the cases demonstrate that racially-mixed persons continue to experience discrimination today…

Read the entire article here.

“Blood is Thicker than Water”: The Materialization of the Racial Body in Fascist East Africa

Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict
“Performing Race,” Volume 4 (2017)

Angelica Pesarini, Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty Member
New York University

Introduction

One of the major issues with the perception of “race” in modern Italy refers to what Alessandro Portelli defines as Italians’ “self-reflexive colour blindness.”¹ What occurs in Italy is not simply a denial of race. Rather than seeing themselves as “White,” according to Portelli, Italians see themselves as “normal.” As a result, because colour is unspoken and not openly mentioned, it is believed that Italians are immune from racism. Such a structural colour-blindness, however, is problematic because it associates Whiteness with normality and, consequently, with Italianness.² Simply put, to be Italian is to be White. Within this discourse, those who do not fit the alleged (White) Italian type are deemed outside the Nation on a number of levels.³

In order to understand and unpack such dynamics it is necessary to consider the category of “race” and the influence this had on the construction of Italian national identity. If “race” is a social construct devoid of scientific validity, it still retains enormous power in the modern world. In the case of Italy, the racial construction of national identity shows a complex ambivalence embedded in discursive practices revolving around an ambiguous production of both Whiteness and Blackness. Such an ambiguity, as highlighted by Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh stems from Italians’ liminal double racial status as racialisers (of Jews, southerner Italians and Africans) and racialised subjects in the U.S. and Australia.⁴ As a result, “race” in Italy today seems to be located within the interstices of a polarised discourse based on notions of “unspoken Whiteness”⁵ able to visually recognise “Italians” from “Others,” namely those called stranieri (foreigners), extracomunitari (a term used to define migrants coming from outside the EU) and the new “migranti” category (broadly used to address African migrants crossing the Mediterranean). Although colour is not openly named, meaningful biological connotations based on phenotypic features located on the body are at the core of Italian national identity. It is important to notice that such a disjunction does not work merely at a visual level. The racialisation of national identity, in fact, transversally affects Italian society and the everyday life of racialised subjects extending from education to housing, labour rights, work opportunities, political participation, health, personal safety, and legal discourse too, as discussed in this paper.

Drawing on ideas of performativity as applied to race, this essay illustrates some of the reasons why in contemporary Italy the idea of Blackness associated with Italianness still appears, to some, an impossible semantic match, an irreconcilable paradox. Owing to the interdependence of colonialism, ideas of “race” and “mixed race,” and the normative construction of Whiteness in relation to national identity, it seems necessary to investigate the nexus of race, gender and citizenship, through a performative lens. In order to do so, I focus on a series of laws and decrees passed during the Liberal and Fascist periods. These include the Codice Civile per la Colonia Eritrea (Colonial Civil Code for the Colony of Eritrea) of 1909, Law 999 of 1933, introduced to regulate the legal identity of “mixed race” children born in the former Italian colonies in East-Africa, and the racial laws enacted between 1937 and 1940. The investigation of these pieces of legislation is useful to highlight not only the influence that Liberal norms had on the promulgations of Fascist racial laws, but also how Italian citizenship, today, is still rooted in the idea of an alleged “racial citizen.”…

Read the entire article here.

“The law recognizes racial instinct”: Tucker v. Blease and the Black–White Paradigm in the Jim Crow South

Law and History Review
Volume 29, Issue 2 (May 2011)
pages 471-495
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000058

John W. Wertheimer, Jessica Bradshaw, Allyson Cobb, Harper Addison, E. Dudley Colhoun, Samuel Diamant, Andrew Gilbert, Jeffrey Higgs, Nicholas Skipper

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had “always properly behaved,” were “good pupils,” and “never …exercise[d] any bad influence in school.” Moreover, the boys’ overwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically “entitled [them] to be classified as white,” according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were “not of pure Caucasian blood,” and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school’s best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion.

Read or purchase the article here.