{"id":20735,"date":"2012-02-17T18:19:55","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T18:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20735"},"modified":"2014-09-08T13:52:43","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T13:52:43","slug":"interracial-love-is-no-societal-cure-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20735","title":{"rendered":"Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

truthdig<\/a>
\n2012-02-17<\/p>\n

Marcia Alesan Dawkins<\/a><\/strong>, Visiting Scholar
\nBrown University<\/em><\/p>\n

A recently released report by the Pew Center<\/a> is a belated Valentine\u2019s Day gift to interracial families. The report indicates that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the U.S. and the change is a sign that acceptance is growing. Although this is definitely cause for celebration and a reason to continue the fight for marriage equality everywhere, we should remember that a fuller and more accurate historical account of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. should focus on social and legal constraints along with demographic patterns<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

One reason why is the large-scale psychological distress experienced by all racial groups resulting from a social and legal history around interracial sex and marriage that\u2019s been fraught with challenges. Legal history tells us that interracial sexual relations have been a troubled issue since the days of colonialism and enslavement, when many African-American women were forced to give birth to mixed race children to increase the enslaved population. This means that a large number of people who can claim interracial heritage do not because they are what multiracial activist <\/strong>Glenn Robinson<\/strong><\/a> calls \u201cmixed by force\u201d rather than \u201cmixed by choice.\u201d<\/strong> We must also consider the many free \u201cmixed by choice\u201d families of various backgrounds whose marriages were not recognized in the census records because miscegenation laws got even stricter after the demise of slavery.<\/p>\n

Then, there were female members of interracial marriages, such as New York\u2019s Alice Rhinelander<\/a> in 1925 or California\u2019s Marie Antoinette Monks in 1939, who were accused of fraud so that their marriages could be annulled and so that they could be disinherited. So, we must remember that before the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia<\/a><\/em> ended bans on interracial marriage in all territories where it was outlawed, interracial coupling was a common practice. That means there may be some validity to the critique that today\u2019s demographic patterns may not represent as much of an increase from historical trends as is being reported. Sadly, this is difficult to prove because there are few historical records to document the trend through its 500-or-more-year history in the U.S…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All truthdig 2012-02-17 Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar Brown University A recently released report by the Pew Center is a belated Valentine\u2019s Day gift to interracial families. The report indicates that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the U.S. and the change is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,394,20],"tags":[7725,3083,2408,2406,4274],"class_list":["post-20735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-glenn-robinson","tag-marcia-a-dawkins","tag-marcia-alesan-dawkins","tag-marcia-dawkins","tag-truthdig"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}