Mixed Race Studies

An investigation of the people who laid the groundwork for Virginia‘s miscegenation law reveals that the pseudo-science of eugenics was a convenient facade used by men whose personal prejudices on social issues preceded any “scientific theory.”  Stated more bluntly, the true motive behind the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the maintenance of white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority—racism, pure and simple.  It was an accident of history that eugenic theory reached its peak of acceptability in 1924 so as to be available as a respectable veneer with which to cover ancient prejudice.  For Powell, Plecker, and their ilk, eugenical ideology was not a sine qua non for legislation, but merely a coincidental set of arguments that provided intellectual fuel to the racist fires.

Paul A. Lombardo. “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Foonotes to Loving v. Virginia,” University of California, Davis Law Review. 1988, Volume 21, Number 2, pages 421-452. http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/21/2/essays/DavisVol21No2_Lombardo.pdf.

Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (1988)
pages 421-452

Paul A. Lombardo, Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law
Georgia State University

This Essay explores private correspondence contained in a restricted manuscript collection along with contemporary news accounts and government documents to explain how eugenics—a popular “scientific” movement during the 1920’s—was used to bolster the arguments in favor of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was struck down in Loving v. Virginia.  The genesis of the Act is described with reference to the private correspondence of the two Virginians [Walter Plecker and John Powell] who lobbied for its passage.  Their involvement with the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America is revealed as an aid to understanding the true motives behind the anti-miscegenation law.

Read the entire article here.

American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 33, Number 44 (2000)
pages 795-835

Leti Volpp, Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

This essay interprets the legal history of efforts to prohibit intermarriage between Filipino men and white women in the state of California in the 1920s and 30s. I do this through examining both public discourse and legal discourse, in the form of advisory opinions of the California State Attorney General and the Los Angeles County Counsel, litigation in Los Angles Superior Court and the California Court of Appeals, and state legislation.

Much scholarship examines antimiscegenation laws through the lens of presumptive heterosexuality, and gives enormous explanatory power to race in a way that ignores the role of class and gender. This paper argues that we need to examine the mutually constitutive nature of these forces in shaping antimiscegenation laws. Thus, I examine how the racial identity of Filipinos was shaped by assumptions about racialized sexuality, colonial relations between the United States and the Philippines, the importation of exploitable laborers without political rights, and the intertwining of gender and nationalism.

The question of whether Filipinos should be prohibited from marrying white women reached the California Court of Appeals in 1933 in the guise of the query as to whether Filipinos should be considered “Mongolian.” The state in 1880 and 1905 had prohibited the licensing of marriages between “Mongolians” and “white persons” and invalidated all such marriages. Subsequent legal challenges involving the right of Filipinos to marry whites betray enormous confusion as to whether Filipinos should be classified as “Mongolian,” or as a separate ethnological group, as “Malay.” This racial classification was put at issue in cases where Filipino/white couples sought to marry, and who therefore asserted that Filipinos were not “Mongolians”; in a case where a mother sought to stop her daughter’s marriage; in two cases where annulment of marriage was sought, one by a white woman, the other by a Filipino man; and in one case in which a prosecutor sought to void a marriage so a white wife could testify against her Filipino husband.

The positioning of Filipinos as “Mongolian,” or in opposition to “Mongolians” as the ethnologically different “Malay,” provides a narrative within which the contemporary identity of Filipinos is created. This history demonstrates that there is nothing natural or preordained about racial classification, and provides an example of how race is made.

Read the entire article here.