{"id":36227,"date":"2014-04-08T21:55:36","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T21:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36227"},"modified":"2015-02-14T19:02:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T19:02:09","slug":"regulating-white-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36227","title":{"rendered":"Regulating White Desire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/wisconsinlawreview.org\/wp-content\/files\/7-Oh.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Regulating White Desire<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/wisconsinlawreview.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Wisconsin Law Review<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/wisconsinlawreview.org\/volume-2007-no-2\">Volume 2007, Number 2<\/a>\u00a0(2007)<br \/>\npages 463-488<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reginald Oh<\/strong>, Professor of Law<br \/>\nCleveland Marshall College of Law<br \/>\n<em>Cleveland State University<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Introduction<\/li>\n<li>II. <em>Loving v. Virginia<\/em><\/li>\n<li>III. The Greatest Threat to the Purity of the White Race: Social Equality Through Interracial Marriage<\/li>\n<li>IV. Miscegenation and Segregation Laws and the Legal Enforcement of White Racial Endogamy\n<ul>\n<li>A. The Enforcement of White Endogamy Norms During and After Slavery<\/li>\n<li>B. White Racial Endogamy and the Segregation of Public Schools<\/li>\n<li>C. The Regulation of White Women\u2019s Desires<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>V. Back to <em>Loving<\/em><\/li>\n<li>VI. Conclusion<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>I. INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the landmark decision <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=415\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Loving v. Virginia<\/em><\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States\" target=\"_blank\">United States Supreme Court<\/a> held that laws prohibiting interracial marriages violated the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution\" target=\"_blank\">Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Equal_Protection_Clause\" target=\"_blank\">Equal Protection Clause<\/a> because they served the impermissible purpose of maintaining white supremacy. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Virginia\" target=\"_blank\">The Commonwealth of Virginia<\/a> had argued that, because the law equally punished whites and blacks, it did not illegitimately single out African Americans for discriminatory treatment. In striking down the statute, the Court rejected the notion that the equal application of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=450\" target=\"_blank\">miscegenation<\/a> laws made them consistent with equal protection.<\/p>\n<p>The Court, however, never adequately addressed an apparent flaw in\u00a0its reasoning. According to conventional understandings of how white supremacy operates, laws promoting white supremacy are supposed to invidiously discriminate against blacks while benefiting whites. But how can miscegenation laws promote white supremacy and the interests of whites if the laws actually restrict their fundamental right of association and punish them if they cross racial boundaries? Was the Court contending that miscegenation laws promoted white supremacy in spite of their incidental effects on the individual rights of whites?<\/p>\n<p><strong>This Article will argue that miscegenation laws functioned to promote the supremacy of the white race by, paradoxically, deliberately regulating and restricting the liberty of white individuals.<\/strong> Segregationists feared that some whites, particularly women and children, wanted to relate to blacks as social equals. Without legal restrictions on the associational rights of whites, segregationists feared that blacks would gain social equality and freely enter into equal intimate relations\u2014and ultimately marriages\u2014with them. This would result in more interracial families, and inevitably end in the creation of a nation of a \u201cmongrel breed of citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This Article contends that segregationist justifications for miscegenation and segregation laws shows that those laws effectively imposed a legal duty on whites to adhere to cultural norms of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/endogamy\" target=\"_blank\">endogamy<\/a>. \u00a0Dominant social groups enforce rules of endogamy\u2014the cultural practice of encouraging people to marry within their own social group\u2014to protect the dominant status of their individual members and of the social group in general. Thus, laws prohibiting interracial marriages regulated white desire in order to protect the dominant status of whites as a group. The <em>Loving<\/em> Court, therefore, ultimately was correct in declaring that miscegenation laws denied blacks equal protection.<\/p>\n<p>Part II of this Article discusses miscegenation laws and the <em>Loving <\/em>decision. It contends that the Court understood that miscegenation laws operated to protect white supremacy, but that it failed to adequately explain how such laws did so. Part III argues that the primary rationale used to justify these laws was the protection of the purity of the white race. Part IV will explain these laws\u2019 history and demonstrate that segregationists enacted and supported them to ensure that whites practiced endogamy. Part V concludes by reexamining the <em>Loving <\/em>decision in light of this Article\u2019s analysis&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/wisconsinlawreview.org\/wp-content\/files\/7-Oh.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Regulating White Desire Wisconsin Law Review Volume 2007, Number 2\u00a0(2007) pages 463-488 Reginald Oh, Professor of Law Cleveland Marshall College of Law Cleveland State University Introduction II. Loving v. Virginia III. The Greatest Threat to the Purity of the White Race: Social Equality Through Interracial Marriage IV. Miscegenation and Segregation Laws and the Legal Enforcement [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1467,8,20,693],"tags":[70,17203,867],"class_list":["post-36227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-loving-v-virginia","tag-reginald-oh","tag-wisconsin-law-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36227","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=36227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}