Mixed Race Studies

The White and Black Worlds of Loving v. Virginia

TIME
2016-11-04

Arica L. Coleman

AP Photo Richard and Mildred Loving on this Jan. 26, 1965, prior to filing a suit at Federal Court in Richmond, Va.

Richard and Mildred Loving—the couple who inspired the new film Loving—lived in a world where race was not simply binary

Hollywood interpretations of true events always take some liberties with the truth, but the new film Loving—based on the intriguing story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the plaintiffs of the case Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia—adheres relatively closely to the historical account. Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ two-hour film chronicles the nine-year saga of the couple’s courtship, marriage, arrest, banishment and Supreme Court triumph in 1967, which declared state proscriptions against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

The film also, however, sticks close to popular myths that have dogged the case for decades, particularly by contextualizing the story within a black/white racial binary—when in fact Richard and Mildred Loving are prime examples of the way such lines have long been blurred…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange

The Common
2016-11-04

W. Ralph Eubanks

All thinking Southerners, at some point, find their minds at war with their hearts, a battle that often ends with the heart claiming victory. It is this triumph of the heart that landed me, a black expatriate Mississippian, back in my home state again. Yet returning to Mississippi after nearly forty years, albeit temporarily, as a visiting professor, has left me torn somewhere between acceptance and separateness. In some ways, the longer I am in the South, the less I try to maintain my distance from the place.

One way my divide from the South has been bridged is in the way I speak when I am here. When I left Mississippi I scrubbed away any outward sign that would mark me as a native son, even succeeding at losing my accent as well as the elongated vowels of my youth. But these days a decided twang has begun to creep into my voice. And rather than correcting my linguistic lapses, I’m reclaiming this part of my Southern background.

But there is one thing I have had difficulty accepting: people thinking I am a white man…

Read the entire article here.

Review: In ‘Loving,’ They Loved. A Segregated Virginia Did Not Love Them Back.

The New York Times
2016-11-03

Manohla Dargis, Movie Critic

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving in the Jeff Nichols film “Loving.” Credit Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

There are few movies that speak to the American moment as movingly — and with as much idealism — as Jeff Nichols’s “Loving,” which revisits the era when blacks and whites were so profoundly segregated in this country that they couldn’t always wed. It’s a fictionalization of the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a married couple who were arrested in 1958 because he was white, she was not, and they lived in Virginia, a state that banned interracial unions. Virginia passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1691, partly to prevent what it called “spurious issue,” or what most people just call children.

The America that the Lovings lived in was as distant as another galaxy, even as it was familiar. The movie opens in the late 1950s, when Mildred (Ruth Negga, a revelation) and Richard (Joel Edgerton, very fine) are young, in love and unmarried. They already have the natural intimacy of long-term couples, the kind that’s expressed less in words and more in how two bodies fit, as if joined by an invisible thread. It’s a closeness that seems to hold their bodies still during a hushed nighttime talk on a porch and that pulls them together at a drag race, under the gaze of silent white men…

Read the entire review here.

The Lovings’ Marriage License Is Now On Display At D.C. Court

DCist
Washington, D.C.
2016-08-31

Rachel Kurzius

Photo courtesy of D.C. Courts.

D.C. Superior Courthttp://dccourts.gov/internet/superior/main.jsf—not usually a stop for tourists looking for the kinds of historic documents found in the Smithsonian museums. Now, though, the court’s marriage bureau is displaying a collection of seven notable marriage applications, according to a D.C. Courts Facebook post.

The most significant is that of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, an interracial couple from Virginia who married in D.C. because anti-miscegenation laws made their union illegal in their home state. They were arrested and charged with violating the Racial Integrity Act when they returned to Virginia…

Read the entire article here.

I’m Not the Nanny: Multiracial Families and Colorism

Book Review
The New York Times
2016-11-03

Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of History
Stanford University

SAME FAMILY, DIFFERENT COLORS: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families
By Lori L. Tharps
203 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95.

In Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel “Caucasia,” two sisters — Cole and Birdie — share a bond so intimate that they create a language only they can understand. Engulfed in the racial chaos of Boston in the mid-70s, the sisters nestle themselves away in the cozy world they have created in their attic bedroom. Their lives are forever changed when their mother, a liberal white New Englander, and their father, a black man with radical political leanings, decide to divorce. The sisters are divided: Birdie lives with her mother and essentially passes for white, while Cole, who looks black, moves in with her father and his black girlfriend. In a city as racially divided and explosive as Boston in the 1970s, this separation by skin color strikes the reader as a chillingly rational decision.

Forty years later, America is no longer the bipolar racial regime of black and white that set Birdie and Cole on such different paths. Not only have personal attitudes changed, but the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 — which upended American immigration policy by abolishing the quota system based on national origins — has also transformed the country’s demographic character. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case of 1967 prohibited legal restrictions on interracial marriages. Federal racial classifications now recognize mixed-race identities. But neither Cole nor Birdie would have been widely understood as mixed-race in the 1970s. As Danzy Senna, who is mixed-race, has written of her own experiences during that tumultuous decade: “Mixed wasn’t an option. . . . No halvsies. No in between.”

Lori L. Tharps’s new book, “Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families,” is an urgent and honest unveiling of how generations of American families have lived with these changes. Tharps focuses on “colorism,” which she notes is not an official word, but has been defined by Alice Walker as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.”…

Read the entire review here.

The End of Anti-Miscegenation Laws: Loving v. Virginia and Interracial Relationships

Multiracial Media
2016-11-03

Joanna L. Thompson, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
University of Illinois, Chicago

Little Rock, Arkansas protest to keep anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.Commons

This past weekend, the new movie Loving hit theaters. The film features the story of interracial couple Richard Loving, a White man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, from Virginia who defied anti-miscegenation laws by getting married. The film highlights their historic Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case in 1967, which overturned anti-miscegenation laws nationwide. (It had previously been legal in a handful of states.)

Seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the SCOTUS decision, thinking of the film and the story of the Loving family, many may not understand the true importance of Loving v. Virginia and the extent to which the United States viewed interracial relationships at that time. Some may even take for granted how interracial relationships have become a societal norm and view the film as slightly shocking. Therefore, to better understand the historical context of the film, let us reveal the State of the Union at that time when it came to multiracial love…

Read the entire article here.

Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity

The Interpreter
The New York Times
2016-11-01

Amanda Taub

Call it the crisis of whiteness.

White anxiety has fueled this year’s political tumult in the West: Britain’s surprising vote to exit the European Union, Donald J. Trump’s unexpected capture of the Republican presidential nomination in the United States, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria and Greece.

Whiteness, in this context, is more than just skin color. You could define it as membership in the “ethno-national majority,” but that’s a mouthful. What it really means is the privilege of not being defined as “other.”

Whiteness means being part of the group whose appearance, traditions, religion and even food are the default norm. It’s being a person who, by unspoken rules, was long entitled as part of “us” instead of “them.”

But national and racial identity were often conflated for the white majority. That identity felt to many white people like one of the most important pillars holding up their world — and now it seems under threat…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Sympathizer,’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Book Review
The New York Times
2015-04-02

Philip Caputo

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras.

That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices.

Hollywood has been still more Americentric. In films like “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon,” the Vietnamese (often other Asians portraying Vietnamese) are never more than walk-ons whose principal roles seem to be to die or wail in the ashes of incinerated villages.

Which brings me to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s remarkable debut novel, “The Sympathizer.” ­Nguyen, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light…

…Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many “super” terms (supermarkets, ­superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) “from the federal bank of its ­narcissism.”…

Read the entire review here.

Trevor Noah Wasn’t Expecting Liberal Hatred

The New York Times Magazine
2016-11-02

Ana Marie Cox

Your memoir, “Born a Crime,” is a striking depiction of your life in South Africa both under and after apartheid. How has that experience formed your perspective on the divisions we’re seeing in America because of the election? America is the place that always seems to treat the symptoms and not the cause. In South Africa, we’re very good at trying to go for the cause of racism. One thing that really never happened here, which is strange to me, was a period where white America had to reconcile with what it had done to black Americans.

I wonder if one difference is that in South Africa, no one could deny that the root of it all was racism, whereas here, people think there’s more ambiguity. What’s scary is how many people don’t realize that racism is written into your system in America. We had a very simple, blatant system. You could see where the tumor was, and you could cut it out. In America, the tumor masquerades as an organ, and you don’t know which parts to cut out because it’s hard to convince people that there’s a problem in the first place…

Read the entire interview here.

Collecting: My special focus on Louisiana’s Free People of Color.

Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas
2016-10-31

Jeremy K. Simien

It’s been said that collecting is a sickness and that a great collector will never stop collecting. I don’t know why, but I’ve always collected things. It started with fossilized rocks on the gravel playground at school, and it continued with other miscellaneous school yard obsessions, some now too embarrassing to admit. Although I will share that at the age of eleven, I was quite serious about finding rare Beanie Babies. No matter the age, I always enjoyed finding and collecting things…

…My personal desire to find and collect portraits of Free people of African descent/Creoles of color is simple. I feel that these pieces act as a crucial visual cue for a story and a message that must be told. The story of the so-called “Free People of Color” goes well beyond my personal family history and any narcissistic need for ancestral gratification. The desire to share and spread this story comes from my need to present a narrative that offers encouragement to not only people of African descent, but also other marginalized groups and persons. The narrative that I hope to present will hopefully be a message of resistance, persistence, and survival…

Read the entire article here.