Category: Law

  • Suit filed over mix-up at Downers Grove sperm bank is dismissed The Chicago Tribune 2015-09-03 Clifford Ward A judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against a west suburban sperm bank whose clerical error resulted in the birth of her mixed-race daughter. DuPage County Judge Ronald Sutter tossed the suit after lawyers…

  • Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015 pages 8-22 DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591476 W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology University of Connecticut In August 2012, nine months after being…

  • Why Right-Wing Bloggers Are Desperate To Prove Biracial People Aren’t Black Think Progress 2015-08-21 Aviva Shen, Senior Editor Shaun King, right, addresses the controversy over his racial identity. Right-wing media has been abuzz over the past few weeks with rumors that Black Lives Matter activist and writer Shaun King is not actually black. Breitbart and…

  • Mark Duggan: mother of man shot dead by police in 2011 calls for urgent inquiry The Guardian 2015-08-04 Diane Taylor Pamela Duggan claims police could have done much more to track down the man who supplied a weapon to her son. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Call for new inquiry comes as demonstrators prepare to march to…

  • Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story Daily Kos 2015-08-20 Shaun King [Shaun King] 14 years old. Sophomore in high school Over the past 72 hours I have been attacked with lies by the conservative media, lies that have been picked up by the traditional media and spread further. I have kept silent…

  • The Shaun King controversy, explained Vox 2015-08-20 German Lopez, Staff writer Shaun King (Source: Twitter) Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is currently at the center of a controversy that has nothing to do with a police shooting or brutality — it’s, instead, about his personal life and racial identity. Over the past several weeks,…

  • Tony Robinson’s mother files civil rights lawsuit over fatal police shooting of son The Guardian 2015-08-13 Zoe Sullivan Andrea Irwin alleges officer Matt Kenny violated 14th amendment equal protection rights and fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches The mother of a biracial man killed by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, has filed a…

  • President Obama’s Letter to the Editor The New York Times Magazine 2015-08-12 Barack Obama, President of the United States Washington, D.C. Illustration by Ben Wiseman For the cover story of our Aug. 2 issue, Jim Rutenberg wrote about efforts over the last 50 years to dismantle the protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1965,…

  • On Being Biracial and Affirmative Action: Where Do I Fit in? Skirt Collective 2015-07-23 Shannon Luders-Manuel Los Angeles, California Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied entrance to the University of Austin, Texas [University of Texas, Austin], is taking her case to the Supreme Court, calling the decision a clear result of affirmative action.…

  • Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. “The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts” chronicles a grassroots movement to…