Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Mixed-race women’s experiences cannot be separated from the history of race and gender politics and contemporary racial debates. The history of hybridity is one in which bodies of mixed-race people have been observed, theorized about, and used as evidence in racial power debates, but their individual experiences are often disregarded. Women of mixed heritage, mixed white and “of color,” are caught in these politically charged, race-based controversies. Given general heteronormative assumptions, as women, and thus as people who can potentially bear offspring and who are expected to assume primary responsibility for raising children in a patriarchal culture, mixed-race women occupy a particularly charged social position. No matter what path a mixed-race woman chooses, she can be perceived as a traitor to both whites and people of color—a traitor to either side of her family, a traitor to equity, a traitor to cultural preservation, and a traitor to cultural purity.
Many people are familiar with Loving v Virginia the Supreme Court case that made interracial relationships legal in the United States. However, there is a much lesser-known court case that dealt with interracial marriage many years before in New York City: Rhinelander v Rhinelander.
Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor Emeritus of Equality Jurisprudence Francis King Carey School of Law University of Maryland
Tanya K. Hernández in her book, Multiracials and Civil Rights, responds to arguments by multiracial legal identity scholars. According to Professor Hernández, these legal scholars who argue that anti-discrimination law fails to protect their right to racial personal identity equality. Specifically, the gravamen of their harm is the misrecognition or non-recognition by law and society of a multiracial person’s chosen identity. Professor Hernández’s book provides an opportunity to consider the extent and degree to which the multiracial identity movement undercuts, not only the right of multiracial individuals to seek legal remedies for race discrimination in various aspects of their lives, but more importantly, the larger project, namely the dismantling of an American hierarchy grounded in an ideology of white dominance. This review essay explores the problems with the multiracial legal identity scholars’ arguments and Hernández’s suggestions for remediation.
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Trina Jones, Jerome M. Culp Professor of Law Duke University School of Law
Jessica L. Roberts, Leonard H. Childs Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law & Policy Institute, University of Houston Law Center; Professor of Medicine, University of Houston College of Medicine
Can genetic tests determine race? Americans are fascinated with DNA ancestry testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Indeed, in recent years, some people have changed their racial identity based upon DNA ancestry tests and have sought to use test results in lawsuits and for other strategic purposes. Courts may be similarly tempted to use genetic ancestry in determining race. In this Essay, we examine the ways in which DNA ancestry tests may affect contemporary understandings of racial identity. We argue that these tests are poor proxies for race because they fail to reflect the social, cultural, relational, and experiential norms that shape identity. We consider three separate legal contexts in which these issues arise: (1) employment discrimination, (2) race-conscious initiatives, and (3) immigration. Based on this analysis, we strongly caution against defining race in predominantly genetic terms.
In the first part of my interview with Ginny Summey, an independent scholar, we talk about her forthcoming book on Elreta Melton Alexander, one of the first Black women to become a lawyer in the US, and North Carolina’s first Black woman district court judge. We also discuss the challenges and benefits of being independent scholars.
Dailey brings into sharp relief how white focus on safeguarding purity fueled centuries of brutality and structural racism. Historian Nell Painter looks at the nineteenth and twentieth century south through an intersecting lens. Her book “Southern History Across the Color Line” brings to the surface the many ways in which the lives of southern Blacks and whites were thoroughly entangled. Join these two thinkers as they reflect on the white American psyche, the messy tangles between races in the south, and the throughline that brings us from Emmett Till, to Loving v. Virginia, to the racism that continues today.
Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Elreta Melton Alexander was a pioneering African-American attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina. Born in Smithfield, North Carolina, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, and grew up comfortably as a part of the black middle class. Coming of age during the Jim Crow period of the South, she was raised by her educated, middle-class parents to be a leader in the community. The descendant of two white grandparents, her bi-racialism formed her early awareness of colorism within the African-American community…
‘I lived to see my lost causes found’ … Pauli Murray. Photograph: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy
She explored her gender and sexuality in the 20s, defied segregation in the 40s and inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, a film is bringing her trailblazing achievements to light
It seems inconceivable that someone like Pauli Murray could have slipped through the cracks of US history. A lawyer, activist, scholar, poet and priest, Murray led a trailblazing life that altered the course of history. She was at the forefront of the battles for racial and gender equality, but often so far out in front that her contributions went unrecognised.
In 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks, Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in the Jim Crow south. In 1943, she campaigned successfully to desegregate her local diner, 17 years before the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Her work paved the way for the landmark supreme court ruling Brown v Board of Education in 1954 – which de-segregated US schools – to the extent that Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the NAACP civil rights group, called Murray’s book States’ Laws on Race and Color “the bible for civil rights lawyers”.
Murray also co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), in 1966, alongside Betty Friedan. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg won the Reed v Reed case in 1971, which ruled that discrimination “on the basis of sex” was unconstitutional, her arguments were built on Murray’s work. Ginsburg named Murray as co-author of the brief. “We knew when we wrote that brief that we were standing on her shoulders,” Ginsburg later said.
Murray ought to be celebrated as an American hero, commemorated in stamps, statuary and street names, not to mention biopics, so why is her name relatively unknown?…
A scene from “My Name Is Pauli Murray.” The documentarian Betsy West, who made the film with Julie Cohen, said, “We just thought, why didn’t anybody teach us about this person?” Amazon Studios
The lawyer, activist and minister made prescient arguments on gender, race and equality that influenced Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
When the lawyer, activist, author and educator Pauli Murray died in 1985 at the age of 75, no obituary or commemoration could contain all of her pathbreaking accomplishments. A radical and brilliant legal strategist, Murray was named a deputy attorney general in California — the first Black person in that office — in 1946, just a year after passing the bar there. Murray was an organizer of sit-ins and participated in bus protests as far back as the 1940s, and co-founded the National Organization for Women. Murray was also the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. In 2012, she was sainted.
Murray has been saluted in legal, academic and gender-studies circles, and in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But her overarching impact on American life in the 20th and now 21st centuries has not been broadly acknowledged: the thinking and writing that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education; the consideration of intersectionality (she helped popularize the term “Jane Crow”); the enviable social circle, as she was a buddy of Langston Hughes and a pen pal of Eleanor Roosevelt, and worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin at the MacDowell Colony in the first year it allowed Black artists.
Murray was devoted to feminism and the rights of women even as, it turned out, she privately battled lifelong gender identity issues. She should be a household name on par with Gloria Steinem or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of whom cited her work often. Instead Murray is an insider’s civil rights icon.
Now a documentary, “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” aims to introduce Murray to the masses. Made by the same Academy Award-nominated filmmakers behind the surprise hit “RBG,” it uses Murray’s own voice and words as narration, drawn from interviews, oral histories and the prolific writing — books, poems and a collection of argumentative, impassioned and romantic letters — that Murray meticulously filed away with an eye toward her legacy. And the film arrives at a moment when the tenacious activism of people of color, especially women, is being re-contextualized and newly acknowledged, at the same time that many of the battles they fought are still raging…
The most important United States Supreme Court case to originate in Louisiana is Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 affirmed the constitutionality of southern segregation laws. In 1890 the Louisiana legislature passed the state’s first segregation bill, the Separate Car Act, which required that railroads provide separate cars for white and black passengers. As a state senator from St. John the Baptist Parish, Henry Demas was one of four remaining African American Republicans in that chamber. In response to the act, leading members of the Afro-Creole community in New Orleans formed the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) to challenge the legality of the act. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy bought a first-class train ticket from New Orleans to Covington and boarded the white passenger car. A private detective hired by the committee ensured that the conductor had him arrested for violating the Separate Car Act, and the test case began. After losing both in a local court and the Louisiana Supreme Court, the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court. In a 7–1 decision, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, asserting, among other points, that it was a reasonable exercise of the state’s police power to maintain the health, safety, and morals of its citizens. Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, however, saw through the reasoning behind the law and the majority opinion, and declared in the most famous dissenting opinion in the history of the Court that the decision established second-class citizenship for African Americans in the South. Through the “separate but equal” rule, that accommodations for each race had to be roughly the same in quality, Jim Crow laws came to dominate southern race relations until overturned fifty-eight years later by Brown v. Board of Education…
The conclusion of a LATTO thought’s first miniseries traces how Indigenous kinship has been damaged by centuries of racist and colonial American policies. Marilyn Vann (Cherokee Nation) and LeEtta Osborne-Sampson (Seminole Nation) share the painful fight that the descendants of Indigenous Freedmen have waged for civil rights within their own nations. Genocide in slow motion and the lack of one equal citizenship created a zero sum game that, left a people—a family—divided.
