{"id":36357,"date":"2014-04-25T07:16:43","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T07:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36357"},"modified":"2014-04-25T07:16:43","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T07:16:43","slug":"opinion-supreme-court-ruling-upholds-americas-mixed-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36357","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Supreme Court ruling upholds America’s mixed view"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opinion: Supreme Court ruling upholds America’s mixed view<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Cable News Network<\/a> (CNN)
\n2014-04-24<\/p>\n

Martha S. Jones<\/strong><\/a>, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
\nUniversity of Michigan<\/em><\/p>\n

(CNN)<\/strong> — I didn’t expect to find the specter of the mixed-race person making an appearance in Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision<\/a> that upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action.<\/p>\n

But there it was.<\/p>\n

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action<\/a><\/em>, Justice Anthony Kennedy<\/a>, writing for the plurality, cast doubt upon the court’s capacity to deliberate over race cases — and mixed-raced people were said to be the culprits.<\/p>\n

Kennedy wrote that “not all individuals of the same race think alike.” Fair enough. But then he went on to suggest that mixed-race people confound the court’s capacity to “define individuals according to race.”<\/p>\n

He continued<\/a> (PDF), “In a society in which those lines are becoming more blurred, the attempt to define race-based categories also raises serious questions of its own.”<\/p>\n

When we blur the lines, as mixed-race people like me<\/a> are said to do, are we really undermining the court’s capacity to determine questions about the equal protection of the laws?<\/p>\n

Kennedy’s view feels familiar: There is nothing new about regarding mixed-race people as a problem in the United States.<\/p>\n

We can trace this idea to the earliest lawmaking in British colonial America. The first laws to regulate race were those that prohibited sex and marriage across the color line…<\/p>\n

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

Opinion: Supreme Court ruling upholds America’s mixed view Cable News Network (CNN) 2014-04-24 Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies University of Michigan (CNN) — I didn’t expect to find the specter of the mixed-race person making an appearance in Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision that upheld […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,459,1467,8,20],"tags":[17270,9447,3142,70,17140,16971],"class_list":["post-36357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-anthony-kennedy","tag-cable-news-network","tag-cnn","tag-loving-v-virginia","tag-martha-jones","tag-martha-s-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36357","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=36357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}