Mixed Race Studies

What if the Court in the Loving Case Had Declared Race a False Idea?

The New York Times
2017-03-06

Brent Staples

Mildred Loving greeting her husband Richard on their front porch in Virginia. Credit Estate of Grey Villet

Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia struck a resonant historical note last year when he proclaimed June 12 “Loving Day,” in commemoration of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that invalidated state laws across the country that restricted interracial marriage.

That Virginia would celebrate the decision was symbolically rich, given that Richmond had been the capital of the Confederacy under Jefferson Davis and the seat of a virulently racist legislature that diligently translated white supremacist aspirations into law.

The Loving decision turns 50 this summer, which will give the annual festivals, picnics and house parties held in its honor a special gravity. But the recent re-emergence of white supremacist ideology in political discourse lends an inescapably political cast to this celebration of interracialism.

As this drama unfolds, historians and legal scholars are criticizing aspects of the Loving decision, including the court’s failure to repudiate the myth of white racial “purity” upon which Virginia’s statute was based…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society

Between The Lines
April 2002
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781896357591

Edited by:

Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor of Gender Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Race, Space, and the Law belongs to a growing field of exploration that spans critical geography, sociology, law, education, and critical race and feminist studies. Writers who share this terrain reject the idea that spaces, and the arrangement of bodies in them, emerge naturally over time. Instead, they look at how spaces are created and the role of law in shaping and supporting them. They expose hierarchies that emerge from, and in turn produce, oppressive spatial categories.

The authors’ unmapping takes us through drinking establishments, parks, slums, classrooms, urban spaces of prostitution, parliaments, the main streets of cities, mosques, and the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. Each example demonstrates that “place,” as a Manitoba Court of Appeal judge concluded after analyzing a section of the Indian Act, “becomes race.”

Contents

• Introduction: When Place Becomes Race / Sherene H. Razack
• Chapter 1: Rewriting Histories of the Land: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada / Bonita Lawrence
• Chapter 2: In Between and Out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor, and the Law in British Columbia, 1850-1913 / Renisa Mawani
• Chapter 3: Cartographies of Violence: Women, Memory, and the Subject(s) of the “Internment” / Mona Oikawa
• Chapter 4: Keeping the Ivory Tower White: Discourses of Racial Domination / Carol Schick
• Chapter 5: Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George /Sherene H. Razack
• Chapter 6: The Unspeakability of Racism: Mapping Law’s Complicity in Manitoba’s Racialized Spaces / Sheila Dawn Gill
• Chapter 7: Making Space for Mosques: Struggles for Urban Citizenship in Diasporic Toronto / Engin F. Isin and Myer Siemiatycki
• Chapter 8: The Space of Africville: Creating, Regulating, and Remembering the Urban “Slum” / Jennifer J. Nelson
• Chapter 9: Delivering Subjects: Race, Space, and the Emergence of Legalized Midwifery in Ontario / Sheryl Nestel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Contributors

Native American Tribal Disenrollment Reaching Epidemic Levels

VOA News
2017-03-03

Cecily Hilleary

FILE – Protesters hold hands in prayer in Temecula, Calif., at a rally protesting the disenrollment of tribal members, Saturday, May 21, 2005. More than a hundred ousted members of tribes from California and five other states gathered to denounce being disenrolled.

All across Indian Country, Native Americans are being evicted from their tribes, with little warning and little legal recourse.

Take, for example, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians, a federally-recognized tribe of Luiseno Indians living on a reservation in Temecula, California, part of the territory where their ancestors lived for 10,000 years.

If you want to be a member, you must prove direct lineage to one or more of the original ancestors forced onto the reservation in the early 1880s.

Pechanga Indian Rick Cuevas traces his ancestry to a woman named Paulina Hunter, who was granted a lot of land on the Pechanga reservation in the late 1800s. He and his family have lived on the reservation as full tribal members for decades.

But in the early 2000s, the tribal council decided to posthumously disenroll Hunter and, by extension, about 180 of her descendants…

…An alien concept

Disenrollment is not native to indigenous cultures, who Galanda said traditionally understood “belonging” in terms of kinship and personal choice, not “blood quantum,” a measurement introduced by the U.S. government.

“The U.S. introduced its concept of who’s an Indian by declaring, under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, that an Indian must be in residence in a reservation likely established by the treaties of the 1800s and be of one-quarter Indian blood,” he said. “The challenge today is that many tribes, if not most tribes, use the Federal government’s criteria for who’s an Indian.”…

Read the entire article here.

LC lecturer looks back on landmark court case on mixed-race marriage

The News & Advance
Lynchburg, Virginia
2017-02-22

Josh Moody

Today Americans enjoy the Constitutional right to marry regardless of race — but it wasn’t always so, and landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia can be thanked for breaking down that barrier.

The famous court case was settled in June of 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and struck down prohibitions against mixed-race marriages. To celebrate that anniversary, Lynchburg College brought in Peter Wallenstein, a Virginia Tech history professor and researcher who has written three books about the court case, among others.

The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a pregnant, mixed-race woman, who married one another in June of 1958 despite Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. The couple actually married in Washington, D.C., in the hope of avoiding a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, but were charged for crossing state lines to marry when they returned to Clear [Central] Point, Virginia…

Read the entire article here.

Before Loving, there was Kinney in Augusta County

The News Leader
Staunton, Virginia
2017-01-08

Dale M. Brumfield, Special to The News Leader

“By the laws of Virginia (C. V. 1873, ch. 105, § 1), all marriages between a white person and a negro are absolutely void…”

—Kinney v. Commonwealth, Oct. 3, 1878, Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia.

In 1967 Caroline County couple Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Jeter successfully overturned Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages, and the newly released movie “Loving” chronicles their sometimes harrowing experiences. Eighty-seven years earlier, however, a courageous Augusta County couple also went to court to force change to Virginia law prohibiting marriages between blacks and whites, but with far less success than the Lovings.

According to the 1878 Virginia Court of Appeals case Kinney v. Commonwealth, Andrew Kinney was a blacksmith who fell in love with Mahala Miller around 1866. The fact that Kinney was black and Miller white made their relationship illegal in Virginia but irrelevant to them. They thumbed their noses at the law and boldly moved in together as husband and wife near Churchville. The following year Mahala gave birth to their first son, William, and two years later gave birth to another son, James.

Just as Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1958 to marry, so did Andrew and Mahala on Nov. 4, 1874, when mixed-race marriages became legal there. After a 10-day honeymoon, they returned to Churchville and had four more boys — John in 1874, Alonzo (who died shortly after birth) in 1875, Tom in 1876 and Harrison in 1877…

Read the entire article here.

‘Loving’ and Virginia: a timeline of mixed-race marriage

The Richmond Times-Dispatch
2017-02-19

The movie “Loving” tells the story of a mixed-race Caroline County couple – and an important story about Virginia itself. We asked the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for some insight into Richard and Mildred Loving, as well as state history. Here is a timeline from the foundation’s Encyclopedia Virginia.

***

April 3, 1691: The General Assembly passes “An act for suppressing outlying slaves,” which grants county sheriffs, their deputies and any other “lawfull authority” the ability to kill any slaves resisting, running away or refusing to surrender when so ordered. The act seeks to prevent “abominable mixture and spurious issue” by prohibiting mixed-race marriages.

October 1705: The assembly passes “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” which summarizes previous laws defining bound labor in Virginia. It makes distinctions between the treatment of white “christian” indentured servants and nonwhite, non-Christians, allowing for the killing of slaves in various situations without penalty.

1848: The assembly increases the penalty for the white partner in an interracial marriage from six months to a maximum of 12 months in prison…

Read the entire article here.

Call for Papers: Power, Intimacy and the State: Mixed Families in Europe and Beyond

Power, Intimacy and the State: Mixed Families in Europe and Beyond Conference
University of Amsterdam
June 12-13, 2017
2017-01-20

Betty de Hart, Professor of Migration Law
Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG)
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

CALL FOR PAPERS (View PDF version here.)

Historically, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have been seen as a problem, in popular culture as well as in academic literature. ‘Ethnically’ and ‘racially’ mixed relationships were described as dominated by power imbalances and as devoid of love. This perspective was brought to bear upon relationships and marriages in colonial times and in times of slavery. Even today, within the context of global migration, mixed couples are often perceived in negative terms, e.g. in discourses on ‘mail order brides’ (marriages between white men and migrant women) or ‘beznez marriages’ (marriages between white women and migrant men).

There is no denying that mixed couples and relations are fraught with power inequalities as they developed in the context of historical and modern-day global inequalities, colonialism, post-colonialism, slavery and racialised hierarchies. However, issues concerning the entanglement of power and privilege with intimate relationships are much more complex than they are often envisioned to be. Since the 1980s, scholars of ‘mixture’ and ‘mixedness’, including critical race and critical mixed race studies, have been questioning this pathologisation of mixed couples and mixed descent. They have called for more nuanced approaches to the lived experiences of mixed couples and persons of mixed descent, that should help us strike a proper balance between an overly negative view on the one hand and an unwarranted romanticised view on the other, which regards mixed relationships and mixed heritage as a means for creating a boundary-less and race-less world.

Hence, this conference addresses questions such as: how we may gain a fuller understanding of the lived experiences of mixed couples, power, and intimacy, without pathologizing and dehumanizing them? This conference aims to approach these questions from international comparative perspectives. How can a balanced view be achieved in the European context, where mixed couples are mostly studied with respect to the contradictory imperative of cultural assimilation on the one hand and respect for cultural difference on the other? And what about other continents such as Africa or Asia?

The conference

The conference seeks to bring together people from different disciplines (ethnic and racial studies, critical (mixed) race studies, history, (post)colonial studies, film and media studies, literature, sociology, anthropology, geography, law, gender studies, sexuality and queer studies, migration studies, et cetera), and from different national backgrounds. We believe that an interdisciplinary and comparative approach is key to gaining the ‘thick’ understanding of mixed relationships that this conference aims at. We especially hope to give a boost to the study of mixture and mixed intimacies in the European context.

The conference is a joint initiative of the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance (University of Amsterdam), and the Maastricht Centre for Gender and Diversity, in cooperation with LovingDay.NL. It will take place on 12 and 13 June 2017, when Loving Day is commemorated as the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia American Supreme Court decision, that held that interracial marriage prohibitions were unconstitutional.

Papers may relate to, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1. Mixed couples and persons of mixed heritage navigating power and inequality

In order to study power differentiations within mixed families adequately, obviously, not only race or ethnicity but also gender and class are relevant identity markers. How can an intersectional approach of race, gender and class illuminate power dynamics within mixed families? How do members of mixed families respond to them? Another issue is how youngsters and persons of mixed descent negotiate the different social dynamics and power relations that shape their experiences? How and by what means do they claim the power to define themselves?

2. Activism and NGOs of mixed families and people of mixed descent

Across the globe, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have become activists and established NGOs to facilitate the telling of their stories and to challenge the disempowerment caused by dominant negative, pathologizing understandings of mixed couples and mixture. Who are the persons and parties that speak in the name of mixed families, and what are the interests at stake? What alternative discourses do they put forward? How do stories and experiences of mixed families and persons of mixed heritage matter in public and political debates on multicultural/multiracial societies, and anti-racism? And how does discovering ‘hidden’ historical stories of mixed heritage function in these debates?

3. State and institutional policies shaping power and inequalities

Power dynamics within mixed couples and families are closely intertwined with the power hierarchies of race/ethnicity, gender, and class within society at large. State laws and policies shape identities of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ and determine the definition of who or what is ‘mixed’. State and institutional policies have both struggled to discourage or prevent, and to encourage or even celebrate mixed relationships. If state and institutional policies decide the meaning of difference, how should we understand various meanings of ‘mixed couples’ and ‘mixed descent across Europe and beyond? What are the transnational linkages between continents, colony and metropole, global north and global south? How does the state shape and regulate mixed families and identities and which effects do they have on the internal power dynamics of mixed couples?

4. Performing mixed relationships in the arts, popular culture and news media

In the present and in the past, the arts, popular culture and news media have been enacting specific scripts for mixed relationships, which have confirmed and critiqued perspectives implied in social policies, and state politics. We will study in what ways the arts, popular culture and news media have constructed, mediated and challenged the dominant, problematizing approach to mixed couples and people of mixed descent, as well as unwarranted romantic idealizations of mixed couples as the key to a fair society. What concepts of mixed identity have been produced by these media and how were these perceived by the general public? What were the agencies of mixed individuals and families in dealing with the written texts and visual images about them? And how have these changed through time and across space?

5. Studying mixedness in Europe

Until today, Europe does not have a strong academic tradition in studying mixed couples and mixed descent, as opposed to, for instance, the US or the UK. How can the study of mixedness in Europe be given a boost, and move beyond the exclusive association of mixed couples with the ‘assimilation versus difference’ debate? How is European research linked to dominant, politicized categorizations of what and who is ‘mixed’? How is research in Europe linked to policy perceptions of the social meaning of mixed relationships and mixed heritage? Do European research traditions challenge the binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’? And what about the heteronormativity of much of the studies on mixed couples and families? How can the development of an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach help us understand the relation between power, intimacy and the state in the European context? How can we take inspiration from the Anglo-American research traditions? And in what ways can we employ approaches from critical race and critical mixed race studies?

Abstracts of maximum 400 words to be submitted before March 1, 2017 at: mixedintimacies-fdr@uva.nl

Check our website for regular updates of conference information and practical matters http://acelg.uva.nl/mixedintimacies

The conference will be held at University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Conference organizers:

• Prof. Betty de Hart Amsterdam, Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG), University of Amsterdam
• Prof. Lies Wesseling, Maastricht Centre for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht University
• Stichting LovingDay.NL

View in PDF here.

The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts by Amber D. Moulton (review)

The Journal of the Civil War Era
Volume 6, Number 4, December 2016
pages 594-596
DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2016.0075

Tamika Y. Nunley, Assistant Professor of History
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts. By Amber D. Moulton. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.)

The 1843 repeal of the ban on interracial marriage in Massachusetts was not a guaranteed victory in the antislavery North. As Amber Moulton’s research demonstrates, the repeal was the culmination of the persistent efforts launched by African Americans and radical abolitionist allies committed to interracial rights activism in the face of formidable antiamalgamation and antimiscegenation opposition. Elucidating the social and political significance of amalgamation, Moulton underscores the process of “advancing interracialism” to further understand the justifications and merging forces that worked for and against interracial marriage and eventually full social and political inclusion (6). Through a close reading of petitions initiated by African Americans, the rhetorical strategies of activists and legislators, popular literature, committee reports, and manuscripts, Moulton presents us with a regional study that broadens our understandings of antebellum debates about interracialism beyond the scope of marriage and into the arenas of racial equality, legitimacy, and citizenship.

The book begins with an overview of the origins of antiamalgamation views rooted in eighteenth-century racial science, white supremacist justifications for colonial slavery, and the work of writers such as Jerome B. Holgate. Even as popular sentiment emphasized interracial relations as either “salacity or tragedy,” antislavery activists such as Lydia Maria Child emerged with alternative, albeit romantic, narratives about interracial relationships (26). Pairing these with popular narratives and images and actual evidence of interracial marriages, Moulton contrasts antebellum ideas about amalgamation with explanations of case studies that show how interracial couples and their children were affected by the ban. Requests made to the overseers of the poor highlight local determinations of illegitimacy that many couples and offspring confronted in efforts to receive public aid. In the second chapter, Moulton examines local responses from another lens, particularly the activism of abolitionists and prominent African American orators. Here we see that African Americans were not marginally involved in the debate over interracial marriage, as the historical scholarship suggests, but instead contributed substantially and at times independently in local organizations, editorials, speeches offered at antislavery conventions, and petitions.

Moulton builds the third chapter around a critical medium of antebellum political engagement—petitioning. The petitioning efforts of local abolitionists—particularly white women—generated controversy at a time when women’s rights, abolitionism, and sectionalism converged onto the antebellum political theater. The legislative response targeted the virtue of white female petitioners and underscored the belief that the women who signed petitions from towns like Lynn, Brookfield, Dorchester, and Plymouth inappropriately supported the repeal of the ban on interracial marriage. White women’s vocal support for repeal implicated them in sexualized discourses of interracial relationships and provoked direct attacks upon their own moral virtue. Moral reformers such as Mary P. Ryan, Eliza Ann Vinal, Maria Weston Chapman, and Lucy N. Dodge defended their activism and their political participation in debates about interracial marriage. They framed their support of the initiative as an effort to curb licentiousness, to promote the moral imperatives of marriage, and to protect the legal interests of mothers and children deserted by men. From the perspective of moralists, the lack of marital rights could only lead to immoral behavior, abandonment, and illegitimacy.

A major obstacle to the repeal effort was convincing poor whites committed to white supremacy in the North that interracial marriage should be legalized. In the fourth chapter, Moulton argues that resistance to a ramped-up fugitive slave law, and the George Latimer incident in particular, generated heightened political fervor against southern slaveholders. Latimer was a fugitive slave who fled from Virginia to Boston, where he was arrested, tried, and eventually manumitted. The case resulted in public uproar and inspired politically charged petition drives that called for an end to policies that required state authorities to detain suspected fugitives. Accordingly, the South’s imposition of the Fugitive Slave Law threatened the rights and freedoms enjoyed by white northerners, thus energizing the political momentum necessary not only to defend antislavery measures but to repeal the interracial marriage ban with the support of unlikely white citizens…

Unmaking Race and Ethnicity: A Reader

Oxford University Press
2016-07-20
512 Pages
7-1/2 x 9-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780190202712

Edited by:

Michael O. Emerson, Provost and Professor of Sociology
North Park University
also Senior Fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research

Jenifer L. Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Program for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Culture at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Sergio Chávez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Race and ethnicity is a contentious topic that presents complex problems with no easy solutions. (Un)Making Race and Ethnicity: A Reader, edited by Michael O. Emerson, Jenifer L. Bratter, and Sergio Chávez, helps instructors and students connect with primary texts in ways that are informative and interesting, leading to engaging discussions and interactions. With more than thirty collective years of teaching experience and research in race and ethnicity, the editors have chosen selections that will encourage students to think about possible solutions to solving the problem of racial inequality in our society. Featuring global readings throughout, (Un)Making Race and Ethnicity covers both race and ethnicity, demonstrating how they are different and how they are related. It includes a section dedicated to unmaking racial and ethnic orders and explains challenging concepts, terms, and references to enhance student learning.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• UNIT I. Core Concepts and Foundations
  • What Is Race? What Is Ethnicity? What Is the Difference?
    • Introduction, Irina Chukhray and Jenifer Bratter
    • 1. Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture, Joane Nagel
    • 2. The Racialization of Kurdish Identity in Turkey, Murat Ergin
    • 3. Who Counts as “Them?”: Racism and Virtue in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont
    • 4. Mexican Immigrant Replenishment and the Continuing Significance of Ethnicity and Race, Tomás R. Jiménez
  • Why Race Matters
    • Introduction, Laura Essenburg and Jenifer Bratter
    • 5. Excerpt from Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • 6. Structural and Cultural Forces that Contribute to Racial Inequality, William Julius Wilson
    • 7. From Traditional to Liberal Racism: Living Racism in the Everyday, Margaret M. Zamudio and Francisco Rios
    • 8. Policing and Racialization of Rural Migrant Workers in Chinese Cities, Dong Han
    • 9. Why Group Membership Matters: A Critical Typology, Suzy Killmister
  • What Is Racism? Does Talking about Race and Ethnicity Make Things Worse?
    • Introduction, Laura Essenburg and Jenifer Bratter
    • 10. What Is Racial Domination?, Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer
    • 11. Discursive Colorlines at Work: How Epithets and Stereotypes are Racially Unequal, David G. Embrick and Kasey Henricks
    • 12. When Ideology Clashes with Reality: Racial Discrimination and Black Identity in Contemporary Cuba, Danielle P. Clealand
    • 13. Raceblindness in Mexico: Implications for Teacher Education in the United States, Christina A. Sue
• UNIT II. Roots: Making Race and Ethnicity
  • Origins of Race and Ethnicity
    • Introduction, Adriana Garcia and Michael Emerson
    • 14. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview, Audrey Smedley and Brian Smedley
    • 15. Building the Racist Foundation: Colonialism, Genocide, and Slavery, Joe R. Feagin
    • 16. The Racialization of the Globe: An Interactive Interpretation, Frank Dikötter
  • Migrations
    • Introduction, Sandra Alvear
    • 17. Excerpt from Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, George J. Sánchez
    • 18. Migration to Europe since 1945: Its History and Its Lessons, Randall Hansen
    • 19. When Identities Become Modern: Japanese Emigration to Brazil and the Global Contextualization of Identity, Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda
  • Ideologies
    • Introduction, Junia Howell
    • 20. Excerpt from Racism: A Short History, George M. Fredrickson
    • 21. Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality, Edward Telles and Stanley Bailey
    • 22. Buried Alive: The Concept of Race in Science, Troy Duster
• Unit III. Today: Remaking Race and Ethnicity
  • Aren’t We All Just Human? How Race and Ethnicity Help Us Answer the Question
    • Introduction, Adriana Garcia
    • 23. Young Children Learning Racial and Ethnic Matters, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin
    • 24. When White Is Just Alright: How Immigrants Redefine Achievement and Reconfigure the Ethnoracial Hierarchy, Tomás R. Jiménez and Adam L. Horowitz
    • 25. From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    • 26. Indigenism, Mestizaje, and National Identity in Mexico during the 1940s and the 1950s, Anne Doremus
  • The Company You Keep: How Ethnicity and Race Frame Social Relationships
    • Introduction, William Rothwell
    • 27. Who We’ll Live With: Neighborhood Racial Composition Preferences of Whites, Blacks and Latinos, Valerie A. Lewis, Michael O. Emerson, and Stephen L. Klineberg
    • 28. The Costs of Diversity in Religious Organizations: An In-Depth Case Study, Brad Christerson and Michael O. Emerson
  • The Uneven Playing Field: How Race and Ethnicity Impact Life Chances
    • Introduction, Ellen Whitehead and Jenifer Bratter
    • 29. Wealth in the Extended Family: An American Dilemma, Ngina S. Chiteji
    • 30. The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination, Vincent J. Roscigno, Diana L. Karafin, and Griff Tester
    • 31. Racial Segregation and the Black/White Achievement Gap, 1992 to 2009, Dennis J. Condron, Daniel Tope, Christina R. Steidl, and Kendralin J. Freeman
    • 32. Differential Vulnerabilities: Environmental and Economic Inequality and Government Response to Unnatural Disasters, Robert D. Bullard
    • 33. Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson
• Unit IV. Unmaking Race and Ethnicity
  • Thinking Strategically
    • Introduction, Junia Howell and Michael Emerson
    • 34. The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States, Rogers Brubaker
    • 35. Toward a Truly Multiracial Democracy: Thinking and Acting Outside the White Frame, Joe R. Feagin
    • 36. Destabilizing the American Racial Order, Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver, and Traci Burch
  • Altering Individuals and Relationships
    • Introduction, Horace Duffy and Jenifer Bratter
    • 37. A More Perfect Union, Barack Obama
    • 38. What Can Be Done?, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin
    • 39. The Multiple Dimensions of Racial Mixture in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: From Whitening to Brazilian Negritude, Graziella Moraes da Silva and Elisa P. Reis
  • Altering Structures
    • Introduction, Kevin T. Smiley and Jenifer Bratter
    • 40. The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates
    • 41. “Undocumented and Citizen Students Unite”: Building a Cross-Status Coalition Through Shared Ideology, Laura E. Enriquez
    • 42. Racial Solutions for a New Society, Michael Emerson and George Yancey
    • 43. DREAM Act College: UCLA Professors Create National Diversity University, Online School for Undocumented Immigrants, Alyssa Creamer
• Glossary
• Credits

Construction of Race and Class Buffers in the Structure of Immigration Controls and Laws

Oregon Law Review
Volume 76 (1997)
pages 731-764

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

In the midst of current anti-immigration sentiment, which is motivating dramatic changes in the United States immigration laws, there exists the myth that prior immigration laws were more equitable and humanitarian. Yet historical analysis reveals that immigration law has been put to uses far from idyllic, and has always been concerned with the racial makeup of the nation. Specifically, national preoccupation with the maintenance of a “White country” is reflected in immigration law. The continued national preference for White immigrants is explicitly featured in the visa profiling codes of U.S. embassies and consulates. This Essay employs a race-conscious lens to analyze the way in which immigration law has been structured to perpetuate a racial hierarchy which privileges Whiteness, primarily by preferring White immigrants to immigrants of color, and secondarily by drafting immigrants of color to form a middle-tier buffer and, alternatively, to provide a bottom-tier surplus labor supply.

Read the entire article here.