Mixed Race Studies

Virginia Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

The New York Times
1965-01-24
page 43

RICHMOND, Jan. 23—A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin here next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the United States Supreme Court and may become a landmark. Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.

In a unanimous opinion last month, the Court struck down a Florida statute punishing extramarital cohabitation by whites and Negroes. It avoided a ruling on state laws against interracial marriage, but the decision raised new doubts about the continuing validity of such laws.

Knew About Law

On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court here that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Loving, both life-long residents of Virginia.

Mr. Loving, 31 years old, is a big, silent construction worker. He is white. His wife, Mildred, 25, is colored—part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January, 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.

The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 53 and 59 of the Virginia Code:

“If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning … they shall be punished — by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

Other sections of the code provide for the annulment of interracial marriages “without any decree of divorce” and for a fine of $200 for performing an interracial marriage ceremony, “of which the informer shall have one-half.”…

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Interracial couples now part of mainstream

The Chicago Tribune
2013-10-23

Dawn Turner Trice, Reporter

Mixed-race relationships becoming more common in Chicago — and everywhere else

Stephen Blessman and Patricia Jones Blessman met in the mid-1990s and fell in love. It didn’t matter to either of them that he’s white and she’s African-American.

They have a lot in common. They are both Roman Catholic and deeply involved in the church. They came of age in the 1960s and are socially conscious.

“But we didn’t get married to prove a point,” said Blessman, 57, who lives with his wife of 14 years and their 5-year-old son in Chicago’s South Loop. “I fell in love with her because she’s funny, beautiful, smart and principled and we’re of the same generation and have the same values.”

As an interracial couple in America, the Blessmans are a relatively rare pairing — but such couples are not nearly as rare as they used to be. A study by the Pew Research Center found that in 2010 about 15 percent of all new marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity — more than double the 6.7 percent in 1980.

The surge has brought the percentage of all current U.S. marriages that are interracial to 8.4 percent. In Chicago, about 7.4 percent of marriages in 2011 involved mixed-race couples, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University…

…Even in politics, where for many years it was considered a drawback to be in an interracial relationship, there’s been a shift. In New York City, Bill de Blasio, a white man married to a black woman, is the front-runner in the mayoral race. In Illinois, two prominent white political figures, Gov. Pat Quinn and former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, are dating black women. And of course, President Barack Obama is the product of an interracial marriage.

Even so, experts say modern mixed-race relationships, like the country’s racial past, can be complicated.

“When I research in white communities across the class division and the country, people say they’re fine with interracial relationships,” said Erica Chito Childs, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center.

“But they also say, ‘Why do it? Marriage is difficult enough. Why make it more difficult?’ You hear about young people growing up in a more multiracial world and being so much more accepting, but the majority says dating is fine, marriage is not.”

She said that many young people still live in racially homogenous neighborhoods and their first pool of partners tends to reflect that. In addition, first marriages are often more closely tied to the expectations of family and community members…

…The Pew Research Center study released last year, using 2010 data, is the most recent major look at interracial relationships. It found that among new marriages in 2010, Asians were the group most likely to intermarry, at 27.7 percent. Hispanics were next at 25.7 percent, then blacks at 17.1 percent and whites at 9.4 percent. For the Pew study, marriages between two people who are mixed-race weren’t considered interracial.

In Chicago, the most common interracial marriages in 2011 were between Asians and whites. Those types of pairings were about four times more likely than black-white marriages, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

Laura Kina, 40, is Japanese-American and white. For the past 16 years she has been married to Mitch Aronson, 54, who’s white and Jewish. She grew up as an evangelical Christian in a small Seattle suburb of Norwegian immigrants, and converted to Judaism after marrying. She said she’s always identified as a person of color…

…Online dating has made it easier for people who want to date interracially but don’t work together or hang out in racially diverse circles.

“It provides a safe space for people who are afraid of rejection and don’t feel comfortable walking up to someone of a different race and asking them out,” said Hunter College’s Childs, the author of “Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture.”…

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crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures

The State
Dubai, U.A.E.
Voicing
2013-03-30

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

“Cyaan live split. Not in this world.”

The first time I read Michelle Cliff’s 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare Savage, the cosmopolitan “bi-racial” protagonist? It could have been either/both really. And that was partially the point.

What I did remember, however—what I felt—was the resonances of feeling the impulse of having to choose identity. The backdrop, for Clare, and to some extent for Cliff too, is about negotiating an existence in between races, cultures, nationalities and an endless act of et cetera. In the book, Clare undergoes a process of becoming(s) through a series of transatlantic yearnings, which culminate in her realization that she must choose her identity. And then, well, dies for that choice. In an essay called “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” Cliff writes that “in [Clare’s] death she has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones.”

All the same, Clare is never accepted and never accepts herself. I’m still not sure what’s worse. No Telephone to Heaven complicates the idea of wholeness and that in order to “be true to yourself” if you have one parent, say, of European ancestry and the other of African ancestry, you should, as a citizen of the West (or perhaps the global West, i.e., the world) acknowledge the ambiguity of your both/and state of being, as if everyone doesn’t exist in a similar mode of being. A multimodal existence— a similar vacillating position of entering, understanding and being in the world. Don’t we all exist between things—parents, cultures, lovers, yesses and nos, life and death?

What I remembered, then, was what I didn’t think I had to be aware of. What I remembered was that until then, until that very moment when I read No Telephone to Heaven, I had identified as “mixed,” which would refer to my White mom and my Black Jamaican dad, who got married and had sex and had miscarriages and then had me. But I mean, isn’t a child always a mixture? Aren’t we (and is the “we” here decidedly North American?) all products of mixings and jumbles and breaking of the law pre-Loving v. Virginia and also victims and perpetrators of rape before abolition, and, and, and…?

I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress…

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Coming Out as Biracial

Human Parts
2013-10-21

Stephanie Georgopulos

A few months ago, I not-so-subtly asserted myself as biracial while having dinner with a new coworker. “I’m a Capricorn,” she’d said. “Yeah…my mom’s black,” I responded (not verbatim, but the exchange was similar). Whoa. What? Immediately after I injected that part of my identity into the conversation, I had a Come-to-Jesus moment. What was I doing? Did I always do this when I met new people?

The answer, if you’re wondering, is yes. (Although the timing and context are usually a bit more appropriate.) I’ve been coming out this way since I was a teenager. First, my friends would do it for me, whenever one of our peers said something racist in front of me (which was often). “Dude. Steph’s mom is black!” The requisite retort was always, “Oh, sorry Steph. Are you half-offended?” (No, but I am wishing tired ass jokes qualified as hate crimes.)

Here it is: My mother is black. My dad is white. Two of my siblings look like my mom, and two of us look like my dad. Of the two who favor my dad, only one is biracial — that’d be me, the pigmentally challenged Michael Jackson of our troupe. Are you confused yet? Good. Welcome to what it’s like to be biracial…

…That’s not to say I understand the black experience. For starters, I have white privilege. Olive skin with curly hair, fine and versatile. Police don’t see me. No one follows me around stores (but they’re confused as hell when I come in to shop with my mother and sister). No one assumes I’m uneducated or that my father left me. No one calls me her token black friend or asks why I talk so white (though I can imagine my mother, sister, and brother have heard that one a bit)…

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Indiana’s Miscegenation Laws: An Ineffective Racist Agenda

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
May 2013
57 pages

Megan M. Harris

An Undergraduate Honors Thesis (HONRS 499)

Miscegenation laws have played an influential and explanatory role in Indiana’s perception and attitudes about interracial relationships. Indiana had stringent regulations against such unions, which existed for a large portion of the Hoosier state’s history. Despite the unusually harsh legislations against these couples, interracial marriages continued to occur in Indiana. In fact, some multiracial communities, such as the Longtown Settlement, were created as safe havens for these couples. Although these laws were repealed in Indiana two years before the country abolished them nationwide in 1967, the state has had persistent attitudes against interracial marriage that couples must endure. In the face of the continual growth of such unions, local and national attitudes can be adjusted to greater social acceptance, especially with a clear understanding of the racism that underlies the previous miscegenation laws that outlawed interracial marriages.

Read the entire thesis here.

How Indiana Punishes Miscegenation

The New York Times
1879-05-21

Terre Haute, Ind., May 20.—William Nelson, a colored man, was sentenced to-day to pay a fine of $5,000 and be imprisoned in the Penitentiary for one year for marrying a white woman. The prosecution originated in spite, but Nelson was convicted under the law of 1856, which Judge Long held to be valid through a decision of the Supreme Court.

‘Longing for Oneself’: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal

Etnográfica
Volume VI, Number 1 (2002)
pages 181-200

Miguel Vale de Almeida, Professor of Anthropology
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa

This essay acknowledges that hybridism, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. Contemporary rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ within a cultural fundamentalism. This paper focuses on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of Miguel Vale de Almeida identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space.

This is an essay–not a research paper–that acknowledges that, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids, hybridism is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The term ‘hybrid’  was applied from botany to anthropology and was associated with both political and scientific speculations on ‘races’ as species or subspecies. The acknowledgment of the common humanity of all ‘races’ strengthened the separation between culture and nature as part and parcel of the project of Modernity (cf. Latour 1994); but it also diverted attention from hybridism to the field of miscegenation and mestiçagem – i.e., ‘racial’ and cultural mixing. Hybridism – and mixing in general – was condemned by some for its impurity and praised by others for its humanism. The result of the century-long debate is, however, much more hybrid itself than a clear opposition. Discourses on miscegenation and mestiçagem tended to be used as ideological masks for relations of power and domination. They were also used as central elements in national, colonial and imperial narratives. The Brazilian case is well known. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of  the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of the Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. In the discourses of national identity, emphasis has been placed upon what the Portuguese have given to the others–a gift of ‘blood’ and culture–and not on what they have received from the others. Present rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ in cultural fundamentalism, policies of nationality and citizenship, and in the politics of representation. This paper will focus on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space. Three periods in the Portuguese production around miscegenation and hybridism will be analysed: a period marked by racist theories; a period marked by luso-tropicalism; and the present period marked by discussions of multiculturalism. Finally, the acknowledgment of creolized social formations as both the outcome of colonialism and the possible examples for thinking of new, less racist societies, closes this exploratory essay…

Read the entire article here.