Mixed Race Studies

The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

Center For Health and Wellbeing
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
001 Robertson Hall
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Friday, 2016-11-11, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair.

Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

For more information, click here.

Mark Loving on the film ‘Loving’ and a Supreme Court case that changed the nation

Eastern Mennonite University
Harrisonburg, Virginia
2016-11-03

Lauren Jefferson, Editor-in-Chief

Mark Loving, a sophomore at Eastern Mennonite University, shows a photo of his great-grandparents, Mildred and Richard Loving. In 1967, the couple won a Supreme Court case that eventually led to freedom for mixed-race couples to marry and live together in Virginia. Their story is featured in “Loving,” a film opening Nov. 4. (Photos by Londen Wheeler Photography; inset photo, Bettman/Getty)

In his native Caroline County, Virginia, Mark Loving II’s family name is well known. Beyond generations of rootedness, there is both a plaque at the courthouse and a historical marker about his family history. One reason why Mark came to Eastern Mennonite University: some anonymity in a rural landscape not dissimilar to home.

But being one of a crowd is shortly coming to an end for this sophomore kinesiology major who plays basketball and has plans to become a physical therapist. On Friday, Nov. 4, a movie will be released, the title of which is one word: his surname.

“I don’t think too many people know,” he said, “but that’s starting to change. The word has got out there.”…

Read the entire article here.

50 years ago: Tucson couple broke down barriers to interracial marriage

Arizona Capital Times
2009-11-01

Luige del Puerto

Henry Oyama was beaming as he led his new bride from the altar of St. Augustine Cathedral in Tucson 50 years ago. She was wearing a traditional white wedding dress, and her left hand was grasping the right arm of her man.

The photos taken that day might leave the impression nothing was out of place, as if it was any other marriage ceremony. But in 1959 the country was on the brink of a major cultural shift to eliminate racism, and the Oyamas had just fought a landmark court battle to overturn an Arizona law that prohibited interracial marriage.

Because Henry Oyama is of Japanese descent and Mary Ann Jordan was white, together they broke down the race-based law that was intended to keep them apart.

The law itself made it illegal for a Caucasian to marry a non- Caucasian, so Oyama felt the onus was on the white person who wanted to marry someone of another race.

“Naturally, the criticism would come more to her,” Oyama said, adding that Mary Ann’s parents believed at the time that their daughter was making herself a target.

The 83-year-old Oyama knows better than most what it’s like to be a target. He spent two years in an internment camp at the beginning of World War II, and he later served the United States as a spy in Panama…

Read the entire article here.

Review: In ‘Loving,’ They Loved. A Segregated Virginia Did Not Love Them Back.

The New York Times
2016-11-03

Manohla Dargis, Movie Critic

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving in the Jeff Nichols film “Loving.” Credit Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

There are few movies that speak to the American moment as movingly — and with as much idealism — as Jeff Nichols’s “Loving,” which revisits the era when blacks and whites were so profoundly segregated in this country that they couldn’t always wed. It’s a fictionalization of the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a married couple who were arrested in 1958 because he was white, she was not, and they lived in Virginia, a state that banned interracial unions. Virginia passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1691, partly to prevent what it called “spurious issue,” or what most people just call children.

The America that the Lovings lived in was as distant as another galaxy, even as it was familiar. The movie opens in the late 1950s, when Mildred (Ruth Negga, a revelation) and Richard (Joel Edgerton, very fine) are young, in love and unmarried. They already have the natural intimacy of long-term couples, the kind that’s expressed less in words and more in how two bodies fit, as if joined by an invisible thread. It’s a closeness that seems to hold their bodies still during a hushed nighttime talk on a porch and that pulls them together at a drag race, under the gaze of silent white men…

Read the entire review here.

The Lovings’ Marriage License Is Now On Display At D.C. Court

DCist
Washington, D.C.
2016-08-31

Rachel Kurzius

Photo courtesy of D.C. Courts.

D.C. Superior Courthttp://dccourts.gov/internet/superior/main.jsf—not usually a stop for tourists looking for the kinds of historic documents found in the Smithsonian museums. Now, though, the court’s marriage bureau is displaying a collection of seven notable marriage applications, according to a D.C. Courts Facebook post.

The most significant is that of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, an interracial couple from Virginia who married in D.C. because anti-miscegenation laws made their union illegal in their home state. They were arrested and charged with violating the Racial Integrity Act when they returned to Virginia…

Read the entire article here.

The End of Anti-Miscegenation Laws: Loving v. Virginia and Interracial Relationships

Multiracial Media
2016-11-03

Joanna L. Thompson, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
University of Illinois, Chicago

Little Rock, Arkansas protest to keep anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.Commons

This past weekend, the new movie Loving hit theaters. The film features the story of interracial couple Richard Loving, a White man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, from Virginia who defied anti-miscegenation laws by getting married. The film highlights their historic Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case in 1967, which overturned anti-miscegenation laws nationwide. (It had previously been legal in a handful of states.)

Seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the SCOTUS decision, thinking of the film and the story of the Loving family, many may not understand the true importance of Loving v. Virginia and the extent to which the United States viewed interracial relationships at that time. Some may even take for granted how interracial relationships have become a societal norm and view the film as slightly shocking. Therefore, to better understand the historical context of the film, let us reveal the State of the Union at that time when it came to multiracial love…

Read the entire article here.

Collection of demographic data regarding multiracial identification.

The New York City Council
Melissa Mark-Viverito, Speaker
2014-11-25 (Passed 2016-11-13)

Int 0551-2014, Version A (2014-11-25)

A Local Law to amend the New York city charter, in relation to the collection of demographic data regarding multiracial identification

Proposed Int. No. 551-A would require the Department of Social Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department for the Aging, the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Department of Education, and any other agencies designated by the Mayor to provide to all persons served by the agency with a demographic information survey that contains an option for multiracial ancestry or ethnic origin. The bill would also require an annual review of all forms from the designated agencies, or any other agency designated by the Mayor, that collect demographic information, are completed by persons seeking services, and are within the administering agencies’ authority to amend. The bill would require all such forms to be amended to contain an option for multiracial ancestry or ethnic origin. Proposed Int. 551-A would also require reporting on the collected data.

Passed (50-0) on 2016-11-13. Enacted (Mayor’s Desk for Signature)

For more information, click here.

Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference

University of Oklahoma Press
2016-10-20
304 pages
Illustrations: 3 b&w illus., 2 maps, 18 tables
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806154879

Robert C. Schwaller, Associate Professor of History
University of Kansas, Lawrence

On December 19, 1554, the members of Tenochtitlan’s indigenous cabildo, or city council, petitioned Emperor Charles V of Spain for administrative changes “to save us from any Spaniard, mestizo, black, or mulato afflicting us in the marketplace, on the roads, in the canal, or in our homes.” Within thirty years of the conquest, the presence of these groups in New Spain was large enough to threaten the social, economic, and cultural order of the indigenous elite. In Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, an ambitious rereading of colonial history, Robert C. Schwaller proposes using the Spanish term géneros de gente (types or categories of people) as part of a more nuanced perspective on what these categories of difference meant and how they evolved. His work revises our understanding of racial hierarchy in Mexico, the repercussions of which reach into the present.

Schwaller traces the connections between medieval Iberian ideas of difference and the unique societies forged in the Americas. He analyzes the ideological and legal development of géneros de gente into a system that began to resemble modern notions of race. He then examines the lives of early colonial mestizos and mulatos to show how individuals of mixed ancestry experienced the colonial order. By pairing an analysis of legal codes with a social history of mixed-race individuals, his work reveals the disjunction between the establishment of a common colonial language of what would become race and the ability of the colonial Spanish state to enforce such distinctions. Even as the colonial order established a system of governance that entrenched racial differences, colonial subjects continued to mediate their racial identities through social networks, cultural affinities, occupation, and residence.

Presenting a more complex picture of the ways difference came to be defined in colonial Mexico, this book exposes important tensions within Spanish colonialism and the developing social order. It affords a significant new view of the development and social experience of race—in early colonial Mexico and afterward.

This mixed race family didn’t ‘see color.’ Then police said a white supremacist killed their son

The Oregonian
2016-10-16

Casey Parks

A banner hanging above the couch proclaims it a house divided.

“But only when it comes to football,” Natasha Bruce said.

When it came to race, the old wood house in Vancouver, Wash. was a safe space. She was the lightest in every family photograph, a white mom married to a black dad. Together, they raised four kids, each with their own mix of ethnicities and football allegiances.

“You can’t hate a race because you’re all of them,” Natasha Bruce told the kids. “Unless it’s red and gold or blue and green, we don’t see color.”

But other people do.

In August, their youngest died after a hit-and-run that prosecutors now consider a hate crime. Larnell Bruce Jr. was 19 years old, black and Latino. Police say a couple with ties to white supremacist gangs argued with Bruce outside a Gresham convenience store — and then chased him with their jeep as he walked away, running him down…

Read the entire article here.

The Dilemma of Interracial Marriage: The Boston NAACP and the National Equal Rights League, 1912–1927

Historical Journal of Massachusetts
Volume 44, Number 1, Winter 2016

Zebulon Miletsky, Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

On a wintry evening on February 1, 1843, a group of Boston’s African American citizens gathered in the vestry of the African Baptist Church nestled in the heart of Boston’s black community on the north slope of Beacon Hill. The measure they were there to discuss was a resolution to repeal the 1705 Massachusetts ban on interracial marriage.  Led largely by white abolitionists, the group cautiously endorsed a campaign to lift the ban. Their somewhat reluctant support for this campaign acknowledged the complexity that the issue of interracial marriage posed to African American communities. In contrast, during the early twentieth century, black Bostonians attended mass meetings at which they vigorously campaigned against the resurgence of antimiscegenation laws led by the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League (NERL). This change is indicative of both the evolution of thinking about the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma that it had frequently represented for black Bostonians and their leaders.

Laws against interracial marriage were a national concern. In both 1913 and 1915 the U.S. House of Representatives passed laws to prohibit interracial marriage in Washington DC; however, each died in Senate subcommittees. In 1915 a Georgia Congressman introduced an inflammatory bill to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit interracial marriage. These efforts in the U.S. Congress to ban interracial marriage reflected widespread movements at the state level.

The 1913 bill (HR 5948) would have prohibited the “intermarriage of whites with negroes or Mongolians” in the District of Columbia and made intermarriage a felony with penalties up to $500 and/or two years in prison. The bill passed “in less than five minutes” with almost no debate, by a vote of 92–12. However, it was referred to a Senate committee and never reported out before the session expired. In 1915 an even more draconian bill was introduced (HR 1710). It increased penalties for intermarriage to $5,000 and/or five years in prison. The bill was first debated on January 11 and passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 238–60. However, it too was referred to a Senate committee and never reported out. African Americans and their allies throughout the nation closely followed the passage of both bills and organized strong opposition, particularly to the 1915 bill. Most likely, their protests were key to the bill’s defeat in the Senate. As several authors have pointed out: Although a symbolic victory [the 1913 and 1915 passage by the U.S. House of Representatives], a federal antimiscegenation policy was not produced. The District of Columbia would continue to be a haven for interracial couples from the South who wished to marry. Indeed, Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple who would be at the center of the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court case that struck down state-level anti-miscegenation laws, were married in the District of Columbia in 1958. Although the bill to ban interracial marriage in Washington, DC, was successfully defeated, by 1920 thirty states had anti-miscegenation laws on their books. (The term “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and was derived from the Latin word miscere, meaning “to mix.”) As late as 1967, when the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the aptly named Loving v. Virginia decision, sixteen states still enforced them.

This article examines the political struggle over the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma it posed for the Boston branch of the NAACP, as well as the national organization. The NAACP and its Boston chapter constituted the principal opposition to these efforts. The author examines the struggle to defeat similar bills that would have criminalized intermarriage in Massachusetts in 1913 and a second attempt in 1927.