Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
The Other Loving: Uncovering The Federal Government’s Racial Regulation of Marriage
New York University Law Review
Volume 86, Number 5 (November 2011)
pages 1361-1443
Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis
This Article seeks to fill a gap in legal history. The traditional narrative of the history of the American racial regulation of marriage typically focuses on state laws as the only sources of marriage inequality. Overlooked in the narrative are the ways in which federal laws also restricted racially mixed marriages in the decades before 1967 (when the Supreme Court invalidated antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia). Specifically, during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, a combination of immigration, citizenship, and military laws and regulations led to restrictions on marriages along racial lines. These laws also converged to prevent married couples, many of whom were White American soldiers and local Japanese women, from living in the United States together. Accordingly, this Article claims that the confluence of immigration, citizenship, and military laws functioned as a collective counterpart to state antimiscegenation laws.
By unearthing this neglected history, this Article seeks to deepen the conventional account of the public regulation of mixed marriages. As the Article reveals, racial barriers to marriage were far more pervasive than previously acknowledged. Contrary to the familiar chronicle, racial restrictions on marriage occurred through federal laws, were enforced by federal officials, took place beyond state borders, and effected distinct harms on interracial couples whose experiences have largely escaped legal and scholarly inquiry. Recovering this lost history thus provides a more complete story of antimiscegenation regulation. Moreover, it draws attention to the largely undertheorized role that immigration law played in preventing interracial marriages and provides insight into contemporary debates on federal involvement in marriage regulation.
“Except under very unusual circumstances, United States military personnel, and civilians employed by the War Department, will not be granted permission to marry nationals who are ineligible to citizenship in the United States.”
—U.S. Army, Circular No. 6
INTRODUCTION
On May 9, 1946, Helene Emilie Bouiss, a half-Japanese, half-German woman, and her husband, John Bouiss, a White American soldier, arrived in Seattle, Washington, aboard a military ship. The two were newlyweds, married by the captain of the ship just days before landing in Seattle. Their decision to marry prior to coming to the United States was significant. This is because six months earlier, Congress had passed the War Brides Act of 1945 (War Brides Act), which conferred on persons who were serving or who had served in the U.S. military the right to sponsor the expedited admission of their spouses to the United States. Thus, Helene‘s marriage to John, an honorably discharged soldier, provided the basis for her entry into the country. Or so they thought…
…D. Mixed-Race Children and Lack of Citizenship
One of the most compelling and troubling aspects about the deployment of immigration and citizenship law in the restriction of overseas marriage was the effect that the inability to marry in Japan had on the children of American soldiers. Children of American-Japanese couples, like their counterparts in the United States, faced discrimination in Japan and were considered inferior because of their mixed racial background. As the Supreme Court noted in Loving, bans against interracial marriage were rationalized as helping to prevent “obliteration of racial pride” and a “mongrel breed of citizens.” Mixed children evidenced the “corruption of blood” that would have destroyed the “quality of . . . [Virginia’s] citizenship.” Indeed, such fear compelled a judge in Louisiana to refuse to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple as recently as October 2009. According to the judge, “[t]here is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage.” Ample scholarship has been devoted to the various social and legal problems that confronted mixed-race children. These problems included the illegitimate status of children whose parents were legally prohibited from marrying.
The federal regulation of interracial marriage similarly led to a generation of out-of-wedlock children in Japan, who were referred to as “GI babies,” “Occupation babies,” or “half-half babies.” As already explained, many American soldiers were prohibited from marrying their Japanese girlfriends. Other couples chose to marry without the military’s approval. In both situations, the relationships lacked the official recognition of a valid marriage. As a result, children of these American-Japanese couples were considered illegitimate. To be sure, the precise numbers of illegitimate Occupation babies whose parents either unsuccessfully sought to marry or married without the official approval of the military are unknown. Indeed, one scholar noted that the U.S. military prohibited both military and Japanese officials from conducting a census of Occupation children…
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Women’s Studies in Communication
Volume 27, Issue 2, 2004
pages 119-148
DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2004.10162470
Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah
This essay provides a critical legal analysis of Anastasie Desarzant’s defamation case. The author argues that the use of an intersectional approach to legal discourse allows scholars to see how race, class, and gender issues influenced the social construction of the “tragic mulatta” in key Louisiana judicial contests. While the essay acknowledges that many contemporary and historical audiences have remembered “Toucoutou’s” (Desarzant’s) racial transgressions, they have forgotten about how some of her neighbors rallied to her cause in the late 1850s.
In recent years, a number of communication scholars have been interested in explicating some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used by feminists and other social agents who have resisted multiple forms of societal oppression (Demo, 2000; Dow, 1997; Shome, 2000; Squires & Brouwer, 2002). I would like to extend these insights by looking at how some women of color and their allies dealt with complexities of Louisiana slavery laws in the antebellum South. By looking at some of the textual arguments and public performances that appeared in Desarzant cases of the late 1850s, I hope to show how racialized subjects dealt with some of the regulatory powers of a judiciary that was dedicated to the preservation of the powers of whiteness. At the same time, I want to illustrate some of the rhetorical strategies that were used in these legal contests, so that we can see how “racial passing” was “both a social enterprise and a subject of cultural representation” (Wald, 2000, p. II).
Today we are used to thinking of racial identities in homogenous terms such as whiteness or blackness (Bonnett, 1999), but there have been times when racial identities had more fluidity and heterogeneity. For many years, scholars (Blassingame, 1973; Dominguez. 1986; Foner, 1970; Lachance, 1994; Omi & Winant, 1994) have been intrigued by the particularities of…
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Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity
Arizona and the West
Volume 27, Number 4 (Winter, 1985)
pages 309-326
William T. Hagan, Professor Emeritus of History
State University of New York, Fredonia
University of Oklahoma
One of the most perplexing problems confronting American Indians today is that of identity. Who is an American Indian? The question is raised in a bewildering variety of situations. Contingent on its resolution can be the recognition of a group by the federal government, voting rights in a multimillion-dollar Alaskan corporation, or acceptance of an individual as a member of a pueblo’s tightly knit society. Nor is this a question which has arisen only recently. It has been a problem for individuals, tribes, and government administrators since the birth of this nation.
Four centuries to the year after Christopher Columbus began the semantic confusion over how to label the original inhabitants of this hemisphere, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan spoke to a more important issue. He devoted six pages of his 1892 annual report to the question: What is an Indian? “One would have supposed,” observed Morgan, “that this question would have been considered a hundred years ago and had been adjudicated long before this.” “Singularly enough, however,” he continued, “it has remained in abeyance, and the Government has gone on legislating and administering law without carefully discriminating as to those over whom it has a right to exercise such control.”…
The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy
Phylon (1960-)
Volume 45, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1984)
pages 314-322
Vashti Lewis
During the antebellum years, the near-white black character played a central role in the American novel. In fact, almost all of the novels of that period which feature near-white characters are antislavery tracts. According to literary critics Sterling Brown and Darwin T. Turner, one of the most tenacious and pervasive stereotypes of anti-slavery fiction is the mulatto, usually a female who elicited sympathy from a white audience not because she was black but because she was an ill-fated white. The following description by Berzon of the tragic mulatto—who in fiction is indistinguishable in appearance from Caucasians—is more explicit than that of Brown’s and Turner’s but conveys the same meaning.
The tragic mulatto is usually a woman. Especially in mediocre melodramas, so often the vehicle for presenting the tragic mulatto character. Nothing supposedly inspires sympathy more than the plight of a beautiful woman whose touch of “impurity” makes her all the more attractive. The fact that many of these stereotyped characters are raised as white women—in fact as aristocratic white women and only discover their Negro blood as adults—allows white readers more identification with them than with full-blooded Negroes.
Catherine Starke in Black Portraiture in America suggests that the popular ill-fated mulatto in nineteenth-century fiction was repeated so often that it came to be archetypal and spoke to a Jungian collective unconscious of a white audience. With the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the female tragic mulatto was permanently implanted in American fiction and in the American national consciousness. Turner claims that the image of Eliza, “heroine of thousands of evenings of flight across slippery floes only a half-stage’s distance ahead of drooling mongrels in stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popularized to such a great extent that Eliza became the prototype for the tragic mulatto type in drama.” In 1853, a year after the publication of Stowe’s novel, William Wells Brown created the mulatto near-white female prototype in black American fiction in Clotel, the first novel known to have been written by an American of African descent The popular image of the near-white black woman was later repeated in most nineteenth-century novels by black Americans—in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), in James Howard’s Bond and Free, (1886), in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and in Pauline Hopkin’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South…
NEA grant and UW book contract awarded for War Baby/Love Child
Laura Kina
2011-11-22
Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University
A National Endowment for the Arts – 2012 Art Works Grant has been awarded to a project for which I am the primary investigator (aka project organizer and co-curator/co-author):
DePaul University
Chicago, IL
$39,000To support the exhibition, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and accompanying catalogue. Featuring art works by approximately 20 contemporary artists, the exhibition will investigate the construction of mixed race and mixed heritage, and Asian American identity in the United States…
ENGL 487: The Mulatto in American Fiction
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio
Fall 2004
Jené Schoenfeld, Assistant Professor of English
The mulatto balances precariously on the razor-thin edge of the color line between black and white. In the antebellum era, the mulatto’s proximity to whiteness made the mulatto an attractive object for Abolitionist sympathy. In the Jim Crow era, that proximity made the mulatto a threat to the security of white privilege. In our present moment, this figure has all but disappeared, though it seems to be re-emerging in a new form with Tiger Woods, Cablinasian, and Vin Diesel, “multiracial movie star.” This course will explore representations of the mulatto in American fiction and culture. In addition to reading some great works of literature, by authors such as William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain (to name only a few), we will use our discussions about the trope of the mulatto to consider some of the more perplexing theoretical issues concerning race in America. We’ll begin with concerns generated specifically by the mulatto, such as: passing (the “problem” of the racially ambiguous body), racial allegiance, biological determinism (nature/nurture), hybrid degeneracy, and the mulatto’s “tragic” marginality. From there, we’ll move to the big questions, including, but not limited to: What is race? What is its determining factor: physical features, ancestry, culture? Can it be chosen or rejected? The course will concentrate on fiction of the Jim Crow era, a period of particularly intense struggle over the significance of race, but may also draw on other disciplines, such as science and law, and other historical moments. This course fulfills the post-1900 requirement. It can be used to fulfill requirements in African Diaspora Studies. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.
Redefining their races: More students choosing to identify as mixed
The Western Front
Western Washington University
Bellingham, Washington
2011-11-18
Casey Malloy
When Western Washington University junior Emily Goronkin applied to the university three years ago, she came to a point in the application at which she was asked for her racial identity. She checked Hispanic because she is 25 percent Mexican.
Goronkin said she doesn’t always select Hispanic when she is asked for her race. The other three quarters that make up her ethnicity — Norwegian, Russian and Scottish — are considered white. She said she usually has trouble deciding what to choose.
“I’ve definitely selected just white on some forms,” Goronkin said. “I’ve also done mixed or chose both Mexican and Caucasian, if I could.”
Goronkin doesn’t celebrate any traditions of Mexican culture, but she believes selecting multiple races represents her accurately.
…When political science professor Vernon Johnson looks out his office window into Western’s Red Square, he doesn’t physically see these statistics represented on campus.
“If you’re walking across campus with a mass amount of people, you will pass people that consider themselves of mixed races, and with a quick observation of those particular students you could think they are white,” Johnson said. “However, they could be Hispanic, and they might have checked that box.”…
Read the entire article here.
The Mulatto in American Fiction
Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 1 (1st Quarter, 1945)
pages 78-82
Penelope Bullock
In its heterogenous population and the individualistic traits of its various inhabitants the United States possesses a reservoir teeming with literary potentiality. Throughout the years, the American writer has tapped these natural resources to bring forth products of value and interest. Even though the characters whom he has depicted are not always lasting literary creations, they are significant in that they are social and sociological indices. Wrought from American life, they reflect the temper of the times and the actualities and the attitudes surrounding their prototypes in life. One of these characters is the mulatto. In this study the portrayal of the mulatto by the nineteenth-century American fictionist is presented.
Who and what is the mulatto? According to Webster, he is, in the strictly generic sense. “. . . the first generation offspring of a pure negro and a white. . . The popular, general conception is that he is a Negro with a very obvious admixture of white blood. (In this study the persons considered as mulattoes are selected as such on the basis of this definition.) But the sociologist more adequately describes the mulatto as a cultural hybrid, as a stranded personality living in the margin of fixed status. He is a normal biological occurrence but a sociological problem in the United States. In the brief span of one life he is faced with the predicament of somehow resolving within himself the struggle between two cultures and two “races” which over a period of three hundred years have not yet become completely compatible in American life.
Two hundred years after the Negro-white offspring became a member of the population of the United States he made his advent into the American novel. How was he portrayed by the nineteenth-century writer?
The treatment accorded the mulatto in fiction was conditioned to a very large extent by the social and historical background out of which the authors wrote. The majority of them wrote as propagandists defending an institution or pleading for justice for an oppressed group. In depicting their characters, these writers very seldom approached them as a sociologist, or a realist, or a literary artist. They wrote only as partisans in national political issues. They wrote as propagandists: they distorted facts and clothed them in sentiment; they did not attempt to perceive and present the truth impartially. The persons of mixed blood pictured by these authors appealed to the emotional, prejudiced masses. But they are not truthful recreations of life and of…