Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Our Hearts: The Ecology of Couple Relationships

California Law Review Circuit
Volume 4, October 2013
pages 155-164

Holning Lau, Professor of Law
University of North Carolina School of Law

In his review of Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, Professor Holning Lau extends Professor Onwuachi-Willig’s analysis of how external support is instrumental to the success of relationships beyond multiracial couples. Arguing that ecological factors should play a larger role in policy discussions about marital relations, Professor Lau examines the debates surrounding same-sex marriage and the Healthy Marriage Initiative and concludes that policymakers should more carefully consider how exogenous circumstances affect the success of intimate relationships.   

Read the entire article here.

According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family

Yale University Press
2013-06-18
344 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
30 b/w illus.
Cloth ISBN: 9780300166828

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

This landmark book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. This book begins with a look back at a 1925 case, in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. Angela Onwuachi-Willig examines the issue by drawing from a variety of sources including her own experiences. She argues that housing law, adoption law, and employment law fail, in important ways, to protect multiracial couples.  In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—she says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.

Brazil in Black and White

Wide Angle
Public Broadcasting Service
2007-09-04

About the Issue

As one of the most racially diverse nations in the world, Brazil has long considered itself a colorblind “racial democracy.” But deep disparities in income, education and employment between lighter and darker-skinned Brazilians have prompted a civil rights movement advocating equal treatment of Afro-Brazilians. In Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, blacks today make up almost half of the total population — but nearly two-thirds of the nation’s poor. Institutions of higher education have typically been monopolized by Brazil’s wealthy and light-skinned elite, and illiteracy among black Brazilians is twice as high as among whites. Now, affirmative action programs are changing the rules of the game, with many colleges and universities reserving 20% of spots for Afro-Brazilians. But with national surveys identifying over 130 different categories of skin color, including “cinnamon,” “coffee with milk,” and “toasted,” who will be considered “black enough” to qualify for the new racial quotas?

About The Film

“Am I black or am I white?” Even before they ever set foot in a college classroom, many Brazilian university applicants must now confront a question with no easy answer. Brazil in Black and White follows the lives of five young college hopefuls from diverse backgrounds as they compete to win a coveted spot at the elite University of Brasilia, where 20 percent of the incoming freshmen must qualify as Afro-Brazilian. Outside the university, Wide Angle reports on the controversial racial debate roiling Brazil through profiles of civil right activists, opponents of affirmative action, and one of the country’s few black senators.

For more information, click here.

Loving v. Virginia (No. 395): 206 Va. 924, 147 S.E.2d 78, reversed.

Waren, C.J., Opinion of the Court, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
388 U.S. 1, Loving v. Virginia
Appeal from the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia
No. 395
Argued: April 10, 1967
Decided: June 12, 1967
Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. [n1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.

In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court [p3] of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. The motion not having been decided by October 28, 1964, the Lovings instituted a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia requesting that a three-judge court be convened to declare the Virginia anti-miscegenation statutes unconstitutional and to enjoin state officials from enforcing their convictions. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate the sentences, and the Lovings perfected an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. On February 11, 1965, the three-judge District Court continued the case to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the highest state court…

…Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888). To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed.

It is so ordered.

Read the entire opinion here.

Virginia Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

The New York Times
1965-01-24
page 43

RICHMOND, Jan. 23—A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin here next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the United States Supreme Court and may become a landmark. Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.

In a unanimous opinion last month, the Court struck down a Florida statute punishing extramarital cohabitation by whites and Negroes. It avoided a ruling on state laws against interracial marriage, but the decision raised new doubts about the continuing validity of such laws.

Knew About Law

On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court here that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Loving, both life-long residents of Virginia.

Mr. Loving, 31 years old, is a big, silent construction worker. He is white. His wife, Mildred, 25, is colored—part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January, 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.

The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 53 and 59 of the Virginia Code:

“If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning … they shall be punished — by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

Other sections of the code provide for the annulment of interracial marriages “without any decree of divorce” and for a fine of $200 for performing an interracial marriage ceremony, “of which the informer shall have one-half.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Indiana’s Miscegenation Laws: An Ineffective Racist Agenda

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
May 2013
57 pages

Megan M. Harris

An Undergraduate Honors Thesis (HONRS 499)

Miscegenation laws have played an influential and explanatory role in Indiana’s perception and attitudes about interracial relationships. Indiana had stringent regulations against such unions, which existed for a large portion of the Hoosier state’s history. Despite the unusually harsh legislations against these couples, interracial marriages continued to occur in Indiana. In fact, some multiracial communities, such as the Longtown Settlement, were created as safe havens for these couples. Although these laws were repealed in Indiana two years before the country abolished them nationwide in 1967, the state has had persistent attitudes against interracial marriage that couples must endure. In the face of the continual growth of such unions, local and national attitudes can be adjusted to greater social acceptance, especially with a clear understanding of the racism that underlies the previous miscegenation laws that outlawed interracial marriages.

Read the entire thesis here.

How Indiana Punishes Miscegenation

The New York Times
1879-05-21

Terre Haute, Ind., May 20.—William Nelson, a colored man, was sentenced to-day to pay a fine of $5,000 and be imprisoned in the Penitentiary for one year for marrying a white woman. The prosecution originated in spite, but Nelson was convicted under the law of 1856, which Judge Long held to be valid through a decision of the Supreme Court.

Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

Public Health Reports
Volume 81, Number 11 (November 1966)
pages 967-971

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Assistant, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

During the course of routine, periodic examinations of birth certificates for accuracy and completeness, the Bureau of Vital Records in the Baltimore City Health Department has observed an increasing number of interracial births in Baltimore from year to year over the past decade. Although such births do not occur in large numbers, they are indicative of a contemporary social phenomenon which is taking place in numerous U.S. urban areas.

In Baltimore this social phenomenon is manifested by children born to white and Negro parents, white and Filipino parents, and white and oriental parents. These children represent the legitimate issue of interracial marriages and, to a lesser extent, the natural offspring of unwed parents.

The bona fide interracial unions are of special interest because Maryland law prohibits the intermarriage of a white person and a Negro to the third generation, a white person and a member of the Malay race, and a Negro to the third generation and a member of the Malay race. (On March 28, 1966, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated a bill previously passed by the State Senate to repeal the 305-year-old law prohibiting white-Negro marriages and the 1935 amendment which broadened the original statute by further prohibiting marriages between whites or Negroes with members of the Malay race.)

There is no provision in the statute which prohibits Japanese-white, Chinese-white, or Chinese-Negro marriages. Obviously, the marriages prohibited in Maryland were contracted in jurisdictions which have no racial restrictions.

Maryland is 1 of 19 States which have an anti-miscegenation statute, a law prohibiting white-Negro marriages. With the exception of the Union of South Africa, no other country has such a law. The legislation prohibiting the marriage of Malays with white persons or Negroes in Maryland is aimed specifically at Filipinos, who are said to represent many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

Despite this interdiction, resident Filipinos and white women have been intermarrying outside of Maryland with increasing frequency over the past several years. Many of the Filipinos in Baltimore are physicians who have come for postgraduate training in medicine. As for other mixed marriages, white persons and American Indians marry frequently and without any legal restrictions. Also noteworthy are the great numbers of U.S. military personnel who married Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women as well as the numbers of Negro servicemen, particularly those who were stationed in England and Germany, who married white women and subsequently brought their wives to the United States.

This study was undertaken to determine the complete incidence of interracial births in Baltimore from 1950 to 1964 by racial origin, country of birth, ages of parents, occupation of father, and legitimacy status of the child. When an interracial birth occurs in a Baltimore hospital, as did all those reported here, the medical records staff doublechecks to assure the accuracy of the registration…

Read the entire article here.

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration  (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration.)

Chez l’auteu
1797-1798
2 volumes : 2 ill., maps (engravings) ; 26 cm. (4to)
856 pages

M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry) (1750-1819)

From The John Carter Brown Library: The mixing of races in Saint Domingue occasioned a plethora of commentaries, mostly venomous and polemical, on the causes and consequences of the colony’s multiracial order. The most famous of these commentaries, though not the most polemical, was by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the colonial jurist and historian whose writings on Saint-Domingue are still a major resource for contemporary scholars. In volume one of his Description, Moreau counted and categorized 11 racial combinations in the colony. He argued that ancestry should be traced back seven generations and hence ultimately comprised 128 combinations. The “science” of skin color received one of its earliest formulations in this work, completed in 1789. Moreau was himself the father of a mixed-race child by his mulatto mistress.

Read the entire book here.

Marginalizing Métis histories through Treaty Territory Acknowledgment

Big M Musings
2013-10-03

Chris Andersen, Research and Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

In the last decade or so, it has become a fairly accepted practice in Indigenous Studies circles for scholars presenting on Indigenous issues to begin their talks with some form of acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples upon whose territories they are presenting. In western Canada, home of several so-called “numbered treaties”, scholars often go further to more specifically acknowledge the treaty territory upon which they present: “I’d like to acknowledge our presence on Treaty 4 territory…” or even the historical names of the peoples on those territories. Scholars have also begun to acknowledge their presence on treaty territories in their book manuscripts and articles. Others – among them graduate students – have added treaty acknowledgments to the signature lines of their emails, some taking the time to find the proper Indigenous terms for the territory. In certain cases, universities have even begun to acknowledge this presence during their convocation ceremonies…

…However, while many of us are aware of the historical treaty process, far fewer are aware of the options Métis were given to “surrender” their Aboriginal title. Certainly, it is possible to envision the Manitoba Act as a form of treaty, since it involved its own forms of negotiation between Métis representatives and Ottawa. Likewise, various historians have noted instances in which Métis individuals and families signed into treaty with their “First Nations” relatives….

Read the entire article here.