Mixed Race Studies

Is There an Identity Beyond Race? Four Case Studies

Michigan Quarterly Review
Volume XLI, Issue 3, Summer 2002

Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. By Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Pp. 301. $26.95.

Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. By Rebecca Walker. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. Pp. 336. $14.

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for his White Family. By Neil Henry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. 321. $24.95.

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. By James McBride. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Pp. 228. $23.95 (hb), $14 (pb).

All four books under review here are concerned with telling dramatic tales about singular, real lives. But they are also books about race. They are driven by the larger goal of making the individual story stand for more than itself.

To write something that is true to the distinctiveness of human experience while also being socially and politically illuminating is hard to achieve. Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone’s Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White seems the most successful, perhaps because it is the only book in the group that is not a memoir. Lewis explains in an Afterword that he first stumbled on the subject while working on his dissertation seventeen years earlier, then returned to it when, as a professor at the University of Michigan, he began directing Ardizzone’s doctoral research on interracial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. They eventually decided to collaborate. The long period of gestation as well as the collaborative approach help to account for the book’s judicious tone in telling a story at once private and public, full of subjective elements yet illuminating of its social moment.

Love on Trial takes as its point of departure a sensational news story from the 1920s. Pursuing the story through careful research into court transcripts and newspaper archives, the authors piece together a fascinating narrative in which the personal intersects the social with tragic consequences.

The story centers on the marriage of Alice Jones, a nanny from Westchester, to Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, a young scion of one of New York’s oldest and richest society families. It seems that the couple met, courted, and married without apparent difficulty until their relationship became publicized by the New York press, probably through the instigation of Leonard’s disapproving father. A scandal erupted when it was alleged that Alice Jones was black—a fact that Leonard subsequently claimed he did not know and which he made the basis for an annulment suit against his wife…

Read the reviews here.

White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

New York University Press
October 2006
236 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780814736944

Ian Haney López, John H. Boalt Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

White by Law was published in 1996 to immense critical acclaim, and established Ian Haney López as one of the most exciting and talented young minds in the legal academy. The first book to fully explore the social and specifically legal construction of race, White by Law inspired a generation of critical race theorists and others interested in the intersection of race and law in American society. Today, it is used and cited widely by not only legal scholars but many others interested in race, ethnicity, culture, politics, gender, and similar socially fabricated facets of American society.

In the first edition of White by Law, Haney López traced the reasoning employed by the courts in their efforts to justify the whiteness of some and the non-whiteness of others, and revealed the criteria that were used, often arbitrarily, to determine whiteness, and thus citizenship: skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and, most importantly, popular opinion.

Ten years later, Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance. In a new, original essay written specifically for the 10th anniversary edition, he explores this racial paradigm and explains how it contributes to a system of white racial privilege socially and legally defended by restrictive definitions of what counts as race and as racism, and what doesn’t, in the eyes of the law. The book also includes a new preface, in which Haney López considers how his own personal experiences with white racial privilege helped engender White by Law.

Table of Contents

• Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Whiteness
• 1. White Lines
• 2. Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship
• 3. The Prerequisite Cases
• 4. Ozawa and Thind
• 5. The Legal Construction of Race
• 6. White Race-Consciousness
• 7. The Value to Whites of Whiteness
• 8. Colorblind White Dominance
• Appendix A. The Racial Prerequisite Cases
• Appendix B. Excerpts from Selected Prerequisite Cases
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Table of Legal Authorities
• Index
• About the Author

Rachel Dolezal, Alice Jones’ Nipples, the Rhinelander Fortune, and Racist White Fire Fighters Who Tried to Pass for ‘Black’

Indomitable: The Online Blog of Essayist and Cultural Critic Chauncey DeVega
2015-06-17

Chauncey DeVega

Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (1924).

I want to extend a sincere thanks to all of the kind folks who donated so far. I have about 10 more “thank you” emails to go. I am very close to the goal for the fundraiser. We have stalled today and hopefully if a few folks thrown in some supportive monies, I can pull in the begging bowl for another six months…

…I am not very kind to Rachel Dolezal. I chose to speak the truth about her racial con game and made my best effort to provide some context for her most offensive act of racial tourism.

Race may be a “social construct”. But the colorline–and who is considered “white” and those considered “non-white” in the United States has a deep, long, and ugly history. Those boundaries have been policed by the law, enforced by violence, and as Ian Haney Lopez notes in the brilliant book White by Law (another complement read is Cheryl Harris’s widely cited 2001 Harvard Law Review article Whiteness as Property“) white racial group membership is a type of property with economic value that has been widely litigated in America’s courtrooms.

While too much energy has already been spent on the Rachel Dolezal racial tragicomedy, one of the most important aspects of “passing” and its many variants (white to black; black to white; brown to black; black to brown; white to something else; Martian to human)–the relationship between race and the law–has been little commented upon by the mainstream pundit classes…

Legal scholar Randall Kennedy’s 2001 Ohio Law Review article “Racial Passing” is an essential and highly informative survey of the law and racial passing in the United States.

It is wonderful writing that contains moments of great wit and storytelling.

Here is a great gem (of despicable behavior) about a scandalous case among turn of the 20th century New York City high society types in which the black body, intimate knowledge, and the color of a woman’s nipples, were introduced as a type of evidence “proving” racial group membership:…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Passing and the Rhinelander Case

English 365: The “Great” American Novel: 1900-1965: Prof. VZ
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina
2015-02-10

Brooke Fortune

Alice Jones with her parents

On page 101 of Passing, Irene references the widely publicized case of Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander (“What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case”). Occurring in the 1920’s, the Rhinelander Case remains one of the most well-known controversies surrounding racial passing, and would have been well within the memories of the novel’s initial audience. Ensuing information for this post is sourced from here and here.

In 1924, Leonard Rhinelander, a member of one of New York’s wealthiest and prominent families, married Alice Beatrice Jones, a multiracial chambermaid. Alice had been brought up against a predominantly white background, attending white churches and socializing with primarily white people—a fact that led the Jones’s non-white neighbors to denounce the family as trying to pass. Due to Rhinelander’s social status, curiosity amassed around the figure of his new wife, and it was eventually revealed and published that Jones’s father was black. Under pressure from his father, Leonard Rhinelander then sought to have his marriage annulled on the grounds that Jones had hidden her racial identity, passing herself off as a white woman…

Red the entire article here.

Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Macmillan
Ninth Edition
2014
732 pages
Paper Text ISBN-10: 1-4292-4217-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-4217-2

Paula S. Rothenberg, Senior Fellow; The Murphy Institute, City University of New York
Professor Emerita; William Patterson University of New Jersey

Like no other text, this best-selling anthology effectively introduces students to the complexity of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States and illustrates how these categories operate and interact in society. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization make Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Ninth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

In addition to including scholarly selections from authors like Beverly Tatum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annette Lareau, and Jonathan Kozol, Rothenberg includes historical documents like the Three-Fifths Compromise, firsthand narrative accounts of how these issues have affected the lives of individuals, and popular press pieces reporting on discrimination in everyday life.

This edition includes 28 new selections considering such relevant topics as the citizenship and immigration, transgender identity, the 2010 census, multiracial identity, the 99% and the occupy movement, the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, South Asian Identity post 9/11, multiracial identity, disability, sexual harassment in the teenage years, and much more.

Table of Contents ^*Articles new or revised for this edition

• Part I THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
  • 1 Racial Formations / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
  • 2 The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright
  • 3 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege / Pem Davidson Buck
  • 4 How Jews Became White Folks / Karen Brodkin
  • 5 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender / Judith Lorber
  • 6 The Social Construction of Sexuality / Ruth Hubbard
  • 7 The Invention of Heterosexuality / Jonathan Ned Katz
  • 8 Masculinity as Homophobia / Michael S. Kimmel
  • 9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History / Douglas C. Baynton
  • 10 Deconstructing the Underclass / Herbert Gans
  • 11 Domination and Subordination / Jean Baker Miller
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part II UNDERSTANDING RACISM, SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND CLASS PRIVILEGE
  • 1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” / Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • 2 Color-Blind Racism / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • 3 Smells Like Racism / Rita Chaudhry Sethi
  • 4 Oppression / Marilyn Frye
  • 5 Patriarchy / Allan G. Johnson
  • 6 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism / Suzanne Pharr
  • ^*7 The 10 Percent Problem / Kate Clinton
  • 8 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack / Peggy McIntosh
  • ^*9 Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life / Annette Lareau
  • ^*10 Class in America—2012 / Gregory Mantsios
• Part III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
  • 1 A Nation of None and All of the Above / Sam Roberts
  • 2 A New Century: Immigration and the US / MPI Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan
  • ^*3 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America / Mae Ngai
  • 4 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves / Evelyn Alsultany
  • ^*5 For many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color / Mireya Navarro
  • ^*6 Testimony / Sonny Singh
  • 7 Asian American? / Sonia Shah
  • 8 The Myth of the Model Minority / Noy Thrupkaew
  • 9 Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race / Carrie Ching
  • Suggestions for Further Readings
• Part IV DISCRIMINATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
  • 1 The Problem: Discrimination / U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
  • 2 Abercrombie Settles Class-Action Suit
  • 3 Apparel Factory Workers Were Cheated, State Says / Steven Greenhouse
  • 4 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks / Jonathan Schuppe
  • ^*5 Why Transgender Identification Matters / Rebecca Juro
  • 6 Where “English Only” Falls Short / Stacy A. Teicher
  • 7 Blacks vs. Latinos at Work / Miriam Jordan
  • 8 Manhattan Store Owner Accused of Underpaying and Sexually Harassing Workers / Steven Greenhouse
  • 9 Muslim-American Running Back off the Team at New Mexico State / Matthew Rothschild
  • 10 Tennessee Judge Tells Immigrant Mothers: Learn English or Else / Ellen Barry
  • ^*11 Tucson’s Ousted Mexican-American Studies Director Speaks: The Fight’s Not Over / Julianne Hing
  • 12 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish / Mana Lumumba-Kasongo
  • 13 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School / Jeffrey Gettleman
  • 14 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselors’ Advice, Study Finds / Eric Hoover
  • 15 College Choices Are Limited for Students from Needy Families, Report Says / Stephen Burd
  • 16 Wealthy Often Win the Race for Merit-Based College Aid / Jay Mathews
  • 17 On L.I., Raid Stirs Dispute over Influx of Immigrants / Bruce Lambert
  • 18 More Blacks Live with Pollution / Associated Press
  • ^*19 National Study Finds Widespread Sexual Harassment of Students in Grades 7-12 / Jenny Anderson
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part V THE ECONOMICS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
  • ^*1 Imagine a Country—2012 / Holly Sklar
  • ^*2 Dr King Weeps from His Grave / Cornel West
  • ^*3 Rich People Create Jobs! And Five Other Myths That Must Die for our Economy to Live / Kevin Drum
  • ^*4 It’s Official: The Rich Got Richer: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds / Robert Pear
  • ^*5 Study Finds Big Spike in the Poorest in the U.S. / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*6 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class / Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
  • ^*7 Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Twenty-to-One: Executive Summary / Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor
  • 8 The Economic Reality of Being Asian American / Meizhu Lui and others
  • 9 The Economic Reality of Being Latino/a in the U.S. / Meizhu Lui and others
  • ^*10 Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*11 Gender Gap on Wages is Slow to Close / Motoko Rich
  • 12 Women Losing Ground / Ruth Conniff
  • 13 Lilly’s Big Day / Gail Collins
  • 14 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited / Bob Feldman
  • 15 Cause of Death: Inequality / Alejandro Reuss
  • ^*16 Undocumented Immigrants Find Paths to College, Careers / Gosnia Wozniacka
  • 17 Immigration’s Aftermath / Alejandro Portes
  • ^*18 Inequality Undermines Democracy / Eduardo Porter
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VI MANY VOICES, MANY LIVES: SOME CONSEQUENCES OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY
  • 1 Civilize Them with a Stick / Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes
  • 2 Then Came the War / Yuri Kochiyama
  • 3 Yellow / Frank Wu
  • 4 The Arab Woman and I / Mona Fayad
  • 5 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past / Oscar Casares
  • 6 The Event of Becoming / Jewelle L. Gomez
  • 7 This Person Doesn’t Sound White / Ziba Kashef
  • ^*8 In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger / Susan Saulny
  • 9 Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste / Joseph Berger
  • 10 Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain / Don Sabo
  • 11 The Slave Side of Sunday / Dave Zirin
  • 12 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy / Tommi Avicolli
  • 13 Requiem for the Champ / June Jordan
  • ^*14 Against Bullying or On Loving Queer Kids / Richard Kim
  • 15 Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge / Alex Williams
  • 16 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism / Joan L. Griscom
  • ^*17 Misconceptions Regarding the Body / Jennifer Bartlett
  • 18 C. P. Ellis / Studs Terkel
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VII HOW IT HAPPENED: RACE AND GENDER ISSUES IN U.S. LAW
  • 1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival /U.S. Commission on Human Rights
  • 2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712
  • 3 The “Three-Fifths Compromise”: The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2
  • 4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read
  • 5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
  • 6 The Antisuffragists: Selected Papers, 1852–1887
  • 7 People v. Hall, 1854
  • 8 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
  • 9 The Emancipation Proclamation / Abraham Lincoln
  • 10 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments
  • 11 The Black Codes / W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 12 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873
  • 13 Minor v. Happersett, 1875
  • 14 California Constitution, 1876
  • 15 Elk v. Wilkins, November 3, 1884
  • 16 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
  • 17 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
  • 18 Korematsu v. United States, 1944
  • 19 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
  • 20 Roe v. Wade, 1973
  • 21 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated)
  • 22 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003
  • ^*23 Equal Protection Indeed / The Economist
  • ^*24 Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution / Linda Hirshman
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VIII MAINTAINING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER HIERARCHIES: REPRODUCING “REALITY”
  • 1 Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes / Mark Snyder
  • 2 Anti-Gay Stereotype / Richard D. Mohr
  • 3 White Lies / Maurice Berger
  • 4 Am I Thin Enough Yet? / Sharlene Hesse-Biber
  • 5 Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse / Sut Jhally
  • 6 The Plutocratic Culture: Institutions, Values, and Ideologies / Michael Parenti
  • 7 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible / Gregory Mantsios
  • 8 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid / Jonathan Kozol
  • 9 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Davis
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part IX SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISIONING THE FUTURE AND MAKING A DIFFERENCE
  • 1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference / Audre Lorde
  • 2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic / bell hooks
  • 3 A New Vision of Masculinity / Cooper Thompson
  • 4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change / Andrea Ayvazian
  • 5 Rethinking Volunteerism in America / Gavin Leonard
  • ^*6 The Most Important Thing in the World / Naomi Klein
  • ^*7 Beyond Elections: People Power / Mark Bittman
  • ^*8 Demand the Impossible / Matthew Rothschild
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index

Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 662, Number 1, November 2015
pages 170-187
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215595390

Betty de Hart, Professor of Law
Radboud University, The Netherlands

Mixed marriages have always had an ambiguous and often problematic relationship with the law. On one hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a key indicator of sociocultural integration into mainstream society. In terms of the law, this perception has been expressed, for example, as privileged access to citizenship status for immigrant family members of citizens. On the other hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a threat to society and social cohesion. In this article, I argue that these contradictory perceptions of mixed relationships have informed the development of citizenship law over time. Building on literature on the regulation of mixed marriages in law, as well as gender and citizenship law, I use the Netherlands as a case study to demonstrate how citizenship law has been used as a tool to prevent certain types of “undesirable” mixed couples and how this approach has informed Dutch citizenship law until today.

Read or purchase the article here.

Identity as Proxy

Columbia Law Review
Volume 115, Number 6 (October 2015)
pages 1605-1674

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University

As presently constructed, equal protection doctrine is an identity-based jurisprudence, meaning that the level of scrutiny applied to an alleged act of discrimination turns on the identity category at issue. In that sense, equal protection relies on identity as a proxy, standing in to signify the types of discrimination we find most troubling.

Equal protection’s current use of identity as proxy leads to a number of problems, including difficulties in defining identity categories; the tendency to privilege a dominant-identity narrative; failure to distinguish among the experiences of subgroups within larger identity categories; and psychological and emotional harm that can result from being forced to identify in a particular way to lay claim to legal protection. Moreover, because the Court’s identity-as-proxy jurisprudence relies on superficial notions of identity to fulfill a substantive commitment to equality, it is susceptible to co-option by majority groups.

This Essay aims to engage readers in a thought experiment, to envision what equal protection doctrine might look like if it were structured to reflect the values identity is intended to serve without explicitly invoking identity categories as a way to delineate permissible and impermissible forms of discrimination. In doing so, it aims to incorporate directly into equal protection jurisprudence the notion that identities like race and gender are not merely a collection of individual traits, but the product of structural forces that create and maintain subordination. Under the “value-based” approach proposed herein, the primary concern of equal protection is not to eliminate differential treatment, but instead to deconstruct status hierarchies. Therefore, rather than applying heightened scrutiny to government actions based on race or gender, it applies heightened scrutiny to government actions that have the effect of perpetuating or exacerbating a history of discrimination or that frustrate access to the political process.

The clearest impact of such a model would be in the context of affirmative action, where a majority plaintiff could no longer simply claim discrimination on the basis of race. Yet, the potential of a value-based model extends to other contexts as well—for example, challenges to voter identification laws, in which political exclusion would displace discriminatory intent and disparate impact as the relevant measure for analysis; and the treatment of pregnant women, in which discrimination on the basis of pregnancy would no longer have to align with gender to receive heightened scrutiny.

This shift has several advantages: It allows the law to make important distinctions between groups and within groups; it alleviates the need for comparative treatment and solutions that favor taking from all over giving to some; it is less likely to generate identity-based harms; it is fact-driven rather than identity-driven and thus better suited to the judicial function; and it serves an important rhetorical function by changing the nature of rights discourse.

Read the entire essay here.

Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist

University of Oklahoma Press
September 2015
304 pages
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806149165

Amina Hassan, Consultant & Researcher
The Azara Group, New York, New York

Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s, particularly in the fields of housing and education. With co-counsel Thurgood Marshall, he argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), is taught in nearly every American law school today. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and for the first time fully reveals his life for what it was: an extraordinary American story and a critical chapter in the annals of racial justice.

Born the son of a former slave and a white midwesterner in 1903, Loren Miller lived the quintessential American success story, both by rising from rural poverty to a position of power and influence and by blazing his own path. Author Amina Hassan reveals Miller as a fearless critic of the powerful and an ardent debater whose acid wit was known to burn “holes in the toughest skin and eat right through double-talk, hypocrisy, and posturing.”

As a freshly minted member of the bar who preferred political activism and writing to the law, Miller set out for Los Angeles from Kansas in 1929. Hassan describes his early career as a fiery radical journalist, as well as his ownership of the California Eagle, one of the longest-running African American newspapers in the West. In his work with the California branch of the ACLU, Miller sought to halt the internment of West Coast Japanese citizens, helped integrate the U.S. military and the L.A. Fire Department, and defended Black Muslims arrested in a deadly street battle with the LAPD. Hassan charts Miller’s ceaseless commitment to improving the lives of Americans regardless of their race or ethnicity. In 1964, Governor Edmund G. Brown appointed Miller as a Municipal Court justice for Los Angeles County.

The story told here in full for the first time is of a true American original who defied societal limitations to reshape the racial and political landscape of twentieth-century America.

Employee’s Change in Racial Self-Identification Cannot Support Discrimination Claim if Employer Unaware of Change

JD Supra Business Advisor
2015-10-05

Jonathan Crotty
Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, Charlotte, North Carolina

Michael Vanesse
Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, Charlotte, North Carolina

In recent years, more Americans have begun identifying themselves as biracial or of mixed racial heritage. This shift has resulted in changes to census and other forms where people are asked to self-identify by race. In addition, some persons of mixed heritage may change their personal identification with one racial category over time. However, as recently pointed out by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, this change cannot form the basis for a race discrimination claim if unknown to the employer at the time the questioned decisions were made.

In Fagerstrom v. City of Savannah, the plaintiff was a police captain of Swedish and Japanese heritage. When filling out forms used for affirmative action purposes, the plaintiff had identified himself as white. When passed over for promotion to major, the plaintiff sued, alleging that he had been discriminated against based on his race in favor of two white captains. The plaintiff said that he changed his self-identification to Asian-American several years previously…

Read the entire article here.

EXCLUSIVE: Race relations in America are ‘getting worse,’ says James Blake’s mother Betty, a white Briton who raised 2 black sons in New York

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Betty Blake, Special to the New York Daily News

Betty Blake with her youngest son James Blake at the 2012 Legends Ball in New York City. Michael Hickey/WireImage

Betty Blake, 80, is the mother of retired tennis star James Blake. Betty, who is white and grew up in England, talks about raising two sons who are black.

In an interview about the events last week that happened to my youngest son, I said that it takes an incident like this to make me truly realize that two of my sons are black.

When you love someone you see the inside, not the outside. I know James wants to focus on the unnecessary aggression, and he’s right, but when you hear (all too often lately) of a confrontation between a white police officer and a young black male, the inference is unavoidable…

Read the entire article here.