Mixed Race Studies

The Crime of Being Married

Life Magazine
1966-03-18
pages 85-
Source: Library of Virginia

Photographs by Grey Villet

A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation

She is Negro, he is white, and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.

Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and livelihood…

Read the article here.

The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity

Virginia Health Bulletin
Virginia Department of Health
Volume XVI, Extra Number 2 (March 1924)
pages 1-4
Source: Pamphlet: Rockbridge County Clerk’s Correspondence, 1912–1943. Local Government Records Collection. The Library of Virginia, (Racial Integrity Act Documents) 12-1245-005

W. A. Plecker, M. D.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia

Senate Bill 219, To preserve racial integrity, passed the House March 8, 1924, and is now a law of the State.

This bill aims at correcting a condition which only the more thoughtful people of Virginia know the existence of.

It is estimated that there are in the State from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.

In the past it has been possible for these people to declare themselves as white, or even to have the Court so declare them. Then they have demanded tho admittance of their children into the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried with white people.

In many counties they exist as distinct colonies holding themselves aloof from negroes, but not being admitted by the white people as of their race.

In any large gathering or school of colored people, especially in the cities, many will be observed who are scarcely distinguishable as colored.

These persons, however, are not white in reality, nor by the new definition of this law, that a white person is one with no trace of the blood of another race, except that a person with one-sixteenth of the American Indian, if there is no other race mixture, may be classed as white.

Their children are likely to revert to the distinctly negro type even when all apparent evidence of mixture has disappeared.

The Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics has been called upon within one month for evidence by two lawyers employed to assist people of this type to force their children into the white public schools, and by another employed by the school trustees of a district to prevent this action.

In each case evidence was found to show that either the people themselves or their connect ions were reported to our office to be of mixed blood.

Our Bureau has kept a watchful eye upon the situation, and has guarded the welfare of the State as far as possible with inadequate law and power. The condition has gone on, however, and is rapidly increasing in importance.

Unless radical measures are used to prevent it, Virginia and other parts of the Nation must surely in time go the way of all other countries in which people of two or more races have lived in close contact. With the exception of the Hebrew race, complete intermixture or amalgamation has been the inevitable result.

To succeed, the intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock must be made impossible. But that is not sufficient, public sentiment must be so aroused that intermixture out of wedlock will cease.

The public must be led to look with scorn and contempt upon the man who will degrade himself and do harm to society by such abhorrent deeds.

The Bureau of Vital Statistics, Clerks who issue marriage licenses, and the school authorities are the barriers placed by this law between the danger and the safety of the Commonwealth…

Read the entire article here.

Reaping the Whirlwind

The New York Times
Opinionator: Exculive Online Commentary From The Times
2012-10-17

Linda Greenhouse, Senior Research Scholar in Law, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law
Yale University

On reading the transcript and listening to the audio of last week’s Supreme Court argument in the University of Texas affirmative action case, my primary reaction was one of embarrassment — for the court and also for Texas.

First the court. Of the four justices most intent on curbing or totally eradicating affirmative action — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — the three who spoke (minus Justice Thomas, of course) failed to engage with the deep issues raised by Fisher v. University of Texas. Instead, they toyed with the case.

Chief Justice Roberts, after posing only one question to the lawyer representing Abigail Fisher, the rejected white applicant who filed a lawsuit claiming she was unconstitutionally discriminated against, flung 27 questions at the university’s lawyer, Gregory G. Garre, many seemingly designed to make the university’s commitment to assembling a diverse student body look silly. “Should someone who is one-quarter Hispanic check the Hispanic box or some different box?” the chief justice wanted to know. “What about one-eighth?” he persisted. “Would it violate the honor code for someone who is one-eighth Hispanic and says ‘I identify as Hispanic’ to check the Hispanic box?”

Justice Scalia piled on: “Did they require everybody to check a box or they have somebody figure out, oh, this person looks one thirty-second Hispanic and that’s enough?”

On it went, and it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that ridicule rather than a search for understanding was the name of the game. “How many people are there in the affirmative action department of the University of Texas?” Justice Scalia asked Mr. Garre. “Do you have any idea? There must be a lot of people to, you know, to monitor all these classes and do all of this assessment of race throughout the thing.” Justice Scalia mused that if the court invalidated the program, “there would be a large number of people out of a job,” a prospect that seemed to tickle his fancy.

It doesn’t take a genius to point out that it’s inherently problematic for the government to count people by race (“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” as Chief Justice Roberts famously expressed the thought during his first term on the court, dissenting from a 2006 Voting Rights Act decision that found that Texas had improperly diluted Latino voting strength). That’s why the Supreme Court has insisted that any affirmative action plan must meet the test of “strict scrutiny” — that is, that the plan must be “narrowly tailored” to serve a “compelling interest.”

But the fact is, as the justices obviously know, that the court has concluded that affirmative action in higher education admissions can clear that high bar — as it did nine years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School decision. In other words, there was a context in which the Regents of the University of Texas, following upon the Michigan decision, chose to act, a history they sought to acknowledge, and a better future they hoped to achieve for their diverse state by supplementing the unsatisfactory and mechanical “top 10 percent” admissions plan with one that considers each applicant as an individual — with race as “only one modest factor among many others,” according to the university’s brief. It was this context that was almost entirely missing from the justices’ questions to the university’s lawyer. The questions were not so much hostile as trivializing…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Why Obama is Black: Language, Law and Structures of Power

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3
pages 468-481

SpearIt, Assistant Professor of Law
Saint Louis University

[W]ords are our tools, and, as a minimum we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. –J. L. Austin

When he filled out the race section of the 2010 U.S. Census survey, President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box despite the fact that Obama is of both European-American and African ancestry. This simple fact raises a number of complicated questions and challenges the idea that race, or more properly, racism, is a thing of the past or “post” as used in “post-racial.” “Post-racial” is rhetoric for an ideology that promotes “a larger national and legal consensus that ignores the bulk of racial disparities, inequities, and imbalances in society, and pursues race-neutral remedies as a fundamental, a priori value.” Ironically, the ideology garners support from Obama’s presidential election in 2008, which launched widespread reports that the country elected its first “black” president. For many, the election provided concrete proof of improved race relations. Such believers epitomized Obama’s election as fulfilling the American promise; for others, however, he symbolized a formidable challenge to the “post-racial” posture. Hence, although the term “post” intends to point to the past, it is really about the future, a destination that has yet to be achieved. It is a way of wishing away the present and supplanting it with an idealized future. Under such pretentions, “post-racial” reflects a desire to identify with something more sublime than the status quo.

Framing Obama as a poster for “post-racial” suffers from various defects. The most fundamental is the assumption that he is “black” in the first place. Although the decision that the president indeed is “black” is practically unanimous, such a conclusion neglects his “white” heritage. President Obama could have checked black and white on the census survey, but he passed on the option. This decision raises unsettling questions for post-racial ideologues. Rather than signal arrival into the post-racial age, however, his choice on the survey could be read as a denial of whiteness or an unfair response given the survey’s purposes, which imply an obligation to represent oneself based on parental lineage as opposed to racial ideology. But what if Obama’s logic led him to identify as “white”? For many this proposition would not ring true. Yet Obama’s self-identification as “black” raises no protest. Why the double standard? Of course the question itself is rhetorical—because a rigorous baseline logic is already at play.

Although Obama’s story is not the only forceful challenge to the “post racial” concept, it affords a solid frame to consider the merits and myths. A sober read of Tea Party rhetoric and the Henry Louis Gates episode indicate that talk of “post-racial” is premature, a point further exclaimed by the resignation of Shirley Sherrod. Far from relegating racism to the back burner, events since Obama’s election have stoked racial flames and revealed that race still matters. His presidential victory might have ignited widespread faith in a “post-racial” era, but a more pessimistic read would render it a backlash from the country’s collective guilt over the Bush regime that moved voters to “reject the party of an unpopular president.” The election may have helped herald in an era of wishful thinking called “post-racial,” yet its logic, paradoxically enough, was governed by the rule of hypodescent, which can drown an oceanic man in the tide of one drop.

What follows is a critique of the “post-racial” ideology. It begins with “Language and Law,” which provides a theoretical backdrop to map how law influences common language, and more importantly, how concepts rooted in racism maintain in the American lexicon through the force of law. The next section, “White by Law,” analyzes the legal and social constructions of whiteness, a historical survey that arrives at constructions in the American context. Building from the previous parts, “Structures of Racism,” outlines how racial language and ideals of white superiority work in tandem to produce structural racism, that is, racism beyond individual bigotry. Today’s racism is not simply the aggregate of individual interactions; rather, the discrimination resides in the institutions and polity of American society, particularly in the language of law. The last section, “Beyond Binaries and Reinscribed Racism,” is a normative venture that offers ideas for stemming the force of these linguistic and conceptual burdens. Centuries of racial sedimentation have made some aspects of racism invisible to the eye, yet an analysis of the post-racial concept shows that debates on race and color are fundamentally flawed. This Essay exposes the concept as a type of wishful thinking, and more critically, how the law prevents this wish from being fulfilled.

Read the entire article here.

Signifying on Passing: (Post) Post-Racialism, (Post) Post-Modernism, and (Post) Post-Marxism

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3 (July 2012)
pages 482-489

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

The social and legal relevance of racial passing appears to be fading as we ostensibly enter a color-blind, post-race era. During the “Age of Obama,” the notion of passing in our multi-racial society seems to many to be antiquated and unnecessary. As the nation has moved beyond state-sanctioned racial discrimination, many believe that the country also has moved beyond the need for a legal dialogue on racial passing and ambiguity. This “retreat from race,” exemplified in part by the apparent declining significance of racial passing, proclaims that the state no longer should consider race when interpreting the law or incorporating democratic values of equality and opportunity. This Essay, however, argues that the continued phenomenon of racial passing can be utilized as a conceptual vehicle to destabilize and de-legitimatize the post-racial agenda.

The continuing relevance of racial passing also underscores the significance of the lessons of Marxism. After all, the concept of “race,” and therefore the existence of racial passing, traces its lineage to the capitalist condition of racialized class distinctions and cultural hegemony (e.g., the white cultural norm). The post-racial agenda seeks to mask the commodification of persons, obscuring the salience of race and discrimination. Thus, the cry for a post-racial America is the latest attempt to lure society into a false sense of class and racial transformation. The continued presence of racial passing may lift the veil from our eyes to the conditions of racial and class exploitation that govern everyday life.

This Essay will proceed in three parts. The first section argues that the particular weltanschauung of post-racialism has obfuscated the continuing relevance of racial difference and conflict. The post-racial model seeks to skew the proletariat perception of social reality by imposing a false-consciousness that conceals existing relations of racial subordination and exploitation. In so doing, post-racialism strives to reject its theoretical Other: Marxism. However, the failings of post-racialism as a worldview are traced directly to its inability to refute the continuing salience of class and racial conflict. The second part of the Essay explores the similarities and differences between the post-racial model and the classic liberal colorblind model. The third part of the Essay concludes that the continuing relevance of racial passing should be utilized to reveal and disrupt the post-racial agenda…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law

The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law
Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008)
pages 231-265

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

INTRODUCTION

What is “race”? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA analyses?

Race is biology. Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

The meaning of “race” is constantly questioned yet rarely understood. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, and moral values to perceived differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-“white” persons.

Part I of this article thus examines the provenance of the “race” concept. The categorization of humans into “racial” groups was neither natural nor inevitable. The initial separation of humans into “racial” categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual prowess. As such, these pseudo-biological differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between “races” of people.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The pseudo-scientific understandings of race supplied by nineteenth-century geneticists and biologists were applied by Nazi Germany in a manner that shocked the world. As a result, the concept of race following World War II increasingly was understood as a socio-political construction with no biological meaning. Modern sociological theories thus uniformly understand race as a social grouping of persons necessary to preserve unbalanced relationships of power. Part II of this article examines this post-war refutation of nineteenth-century “race science,” as well as the core assumptions underlying modern racial theory.

Race is phenotype. Race is color. Race is language. Race is citizenship. Race is class. Race is culture. Race is assimilation. Race is law.

Reducing race to a single critical “essence” is an impossible endeavor. While one’s phenotype and color may contribute to racial categorization, so can one’s national origin, social class and language. As a result, race has a complex social meaning that depends in part on the prevailing “common understanding and meaning” of society. Not-so-antiquated notions of race once deemed Italian, Irish and Southern European immigrants and their descendants as “non-white” and cursed with inferior genetic stock. These groups eventually obtained “Whiteness” based on changing social understandings of their assimilatory potential, and the formation of a racial identity defined in opposition to “Blackness.” The elusive nature of race is similarly illustrated by the conflict between the legal racialization of Middle Eastern and Mexican persons as “white” during certain historical periods, and the social racialization of these persons as “non-white” and racially distinct during other times.

Race is subjective. Race is objective. Race is whiteness. Race is blackness. Race is fixed. Race is malleable. Race is performance.

Race is constantly in flux depending on one’s baseline understanding of the nature of race. I am black according to certain understandings of race, while other interpretations may render me white. I am Latino, Creole, Egyptian, and “other” according to some outsider interpretations of race, yet I can also be reduced to “mixed” by utilizing an alternative understanding of race. Outsider perceptions of race in turn may change according to my performance of race, and how race is performed around me.
Race is biology.

Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

Notwithstanding the post-war rejection of a biological interpretation of race, modern genetic science has increasingly claimed the ability to identify “race” through the biological analysis of DNA samples. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere analyze individual DNA samples to identify the likely “race” of a criminal suspect, while courts in the United States increasingly admit expert testimony stating the statistical probability that a criminal suspect belongs to a specific race based on such DNA analyses. Such a re-biologicalization of race clearly contradicts the classical post-war theory of race as a social construct. Part III of this article examines the contemporary re-interpretation of race as having some biologically traceable genetic essence.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles. Part IV of this article argues that contemporary genetics has misapprehended the elusive nature of race in a manner strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century race science…

Read the entire article here.

The Sexualization of Difference: A Comparison of Mixed-Race and Same-Gender Marriage

Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2002
pages 255-288

Josephine Ross, Associate Professor of Law; Supervisor, Criminal Justice Clinic
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

I. Introduction: Mixed-Race Love as a Sexual Orientation

The past prohibition of mixed-race marriages in many U.S. states is often cited by those who support civil recognition of same-sex marriages. Advocates and scholars reason that just as it is no longer legal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of race, it should be illegal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of sex. Unfortunately, the comparison usually stops there. No effort has been made by the legal community to examine the actual lives of these two groups of outsider couples to see if the comparison holds together descriptively as well as formalistically. Nor have contemporary attitudes towards same-sex couples been compared to historical data detailing attitudes towards mixed-race sexuality during the time that mixed-race relationships were illicit. This Article will compare heterosexual mixed-race and same-sex unions (both mixed-race and monorace) in the context of history, both legal and cultural. The historical treatment of mixed-race marriages in this country supplies important information regarding the way society marginalizes certain relationships, and the connection between deprivation of marriage rights and the sexualization of relationships.

To say that a relationship is “sexualized,” means it is viewed as essentially sexual, and is not seen to be about commitment, communication or love. To understand what I mean by the word “sexualized,” consider certain reactions to an elementary school teacher who came out to his class in Newton, Massachusetts. When asked if he was married, the teacher responded that he was not, but that if he were to live with someone, he would live with a man that he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other.” This response gave rise to a parent’s complaint that the teacher had talked inappropriately about “sex;’ That story nicely encapsulates what I mean by the sexualization of same-sex love. If the teacher had answered that he would like to marry a woman whom he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other,” no one would have sexualized his response.

My argument is that the sexualization of gay relationships is similar to the way interracial relationships were sexualized in the past. For both, sexualization is a cause as well as a symptom of disempowerment. In the 1970s, social scientists began to describe the continued sexualization of black-white relationships in the United States from the time of slavery through the decade following the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. They noted that narrative discourse around mixed-race couples was sexualized, and that mixed-race love was viewed as something pornographic and essentially different from mono-race love. Social scientists uncovered attitudes towards mixed-race couples by family members and society at large that I believe mirror attitudes towards same-sex couples.

Part II of this Article provides clues to the link between the sexualization of relationships that trespass on societal norms, and the deprivation of power and rights. Section A explores how mixed-race relationships were sexualized in the past, while Section B examines how the law has been used to restrict both mixed-race and gay couples. Section B also explores the cases that predate Loving and the reasons for denying recognition to mixed-race marriages. Those reasons are compared to arguments made by marriage opponents in same-sex marriage cases today.

Part III considers similarities in the lives of gay couples and mixed-race couples in order to demonstrate that analogizing the issue of marriage as it relates to each group is not merely a trick of logic. Section A examines the analogy between Loving v. Virginia and same-sex marriage cases. Section B reviews recent social science data that illustrates many parallel experiences of outsider couples, including the reactions of family members and society, the ways non-traditional couples cope with those negative reactions, and the reasons couples commit to one another despite adversity. By comparing mixed-race and same-sex couples, one can learn a good deal about the way society grants status and safety to certain relationships while marginalizing others.

Part IV asks whether the term “sexual orientation” should be expanded to include those in mixed-race, heterosexual relationships. How one answers this question will shed light on whether the phrase “sexual orientation” is a useful or accurate term when applied to those in gay relationships.

In the Conclusion to this Article, I urge scholars to desist from sexualizing gay relationships. Like mixed-race couples, same-sex partners are not necessarily any more sexual than their heterosexual counterparts. Gay couples, like mixed-race couples, are different not because of what they do or do not do in the bedroom, but because of the meaning ascribed to these couples in supermarkets, in dance halls, and in PTA meetings. Advocates and scholars should learn from past sexualization of mixed-race love and consider more accurate and less sexualized means to characterize same-sex love and relationships…

…The ban on mixed-race marriage did not eliminate sexual activity, but affected the nature of the sexuality, making it secret, closeted and sinful. In the case of white men and black women, the taboo distorted their relationships, suppressing affection or the appearance of affection, rendering them sexual liaisons only. As sociologist [Calvin C.] Hernton wrote, a white man “can sleep with [a black lover] discreetly, give her mulatto babies, but in all of this he must never act as if he loves her.”

Although the apartheid system in this country was intended to prevent access to white women by black men, the system was not completely successful. Hernton documented in his personal life and in his work a great deal of sexual activity between white women and black men in this era. In his opinion, women were often the aggressors because they were the ones with power during segregation. Jim Crow laws could even be said to aid the women’s conquest because although there were dreadful consequences for black men who consented and were discovered, men were sometimes more afraid to resist for fear they would be framed as rapists and face mob violence. As with white men’s liaisons with black women, the interracial sex taboo served to make liaisons between white women and black men purely sexual and clandestine…

Read the entire article here.

Barbosa made Brazil’s first black Supreme Court leader

BBC News
2012-10-10

The judge overseeing a major corruption trial in Brazil has been appointed president of the Supreme Court, the first black person to hold the post.

Judge Joaquim Barbosa, who was born into a poor family, has been praised for his judicial independence.

He will take over the post once the “Mensalao” corruption trial ends.

Brazil has the largest black population after Nigeria, many of them descendants of African slaves, but black people rarely achieve high office.

Judge Barbosa, who is 58, has been appointed by other judges, following the Court’s tradition of nominating its most senior member…

…In 2003, he became a household name in Brazil when he was appointed by then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the Supreme Court.

Two mixed-race judges had previously been members of the court, but Mr Barbosa said he was the first one who could be “widely recognised as a black man”.

“This act has great significance, as it indicates to society the end of certain visible and invisible barriers,” he said at the time…

Read the entire article here.

American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy

Harper and Brothers Publishing
1944
822 pages

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)

With the Assistance of

Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose

This landmark effort to understand African-American people in the New World provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks.

CONTENTS

• Foreword, by Frederick P. Keppel
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
  1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue
  2. Valuations and Beliefs
  3. A White Man’s Problem
  4. Not an Isolated Problem
  5. Some Further Notes on the Scope and Direction of This Study
  6. A Warning to the Reader
• PART I. THE APPROACH
  • Chapter 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience
    1. Unity of Ideals and Diversity of Culture
    2. American Nationalism
    3. Some Historical Reflections
    4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment
    5. The Roots in Christianity
    6. The Roots in English Law
    7. American Conservatism
    8. The American Conception of Law and Order
    9. Natural Law and American Puritanism
    10. The Faltering Judicial Order
    11. Intellectual Defeatism
    12. “Lip-Service”
    13. Value Premises in This Study
  • Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem
    1. On the Minds of the Whites
    2. To the Negroes Themselves
    3. Explaining the Problem Away
    4. Explorations in Escape
    5. The Etiquette of Discussion
    6. The Convenience of Ignorance
    7. Negro and White Voices
    8. The North and the South
  • Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem
    1. American Minority Problems
    2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
    3. The White Man’s Theory of Color Caste
    4. The “Rank Order of Discriminations”
    5. Relationships between Lower Class Groups
    6. The Manifoldness and the Unity of the Negro Problem
    7. The Theory of the Vicious Circle
    8. A Theory of Democracy
• PART II. RACE
  • Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
    1. Biology and Moral Equalitarianism
    2. The Ideological Clash in America
    3. The Ideological Compromise
    4. Reflections in Science
    5. The Position of the Negro Writers
    6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
    7. Beliefs with a Purpose
    8. Specific Rationalization Needs
    9. Rectifying Beliefs
    10. The Study of Beliefs
  • Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry
    1. The American Definition of “Negro”
    2. African Ancestry
    3. Changes in Physical Appearance
    4. Early Miscegenation
    5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
    6. Miscegenation in Recent Times
    7. “Passing”
    8. Social and Biological Selection
    9. Present and Future Genetic Composition Trends
  • Chapter 6. Racial Characteristics
    1. Physical Traits
    2. Biological Susceptibility to Disease
    3. Psychic Traits
    4. Frontiers of Constructive Research
• PART III. POPULATION AND MIGRATION
  • Chapter 7. Population
    1. The Growth of the Negro Population
    2. Births and Deaths
    3. Summary
    4. Ends and Means of Population Policy
    5. Controlling the Death Rate
    6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate
    7. Birth Control Facilities Tor Negroes
  • Chapter 8. Migration
    1. Overview
    2. A Closer View
    3. The Great Migration to the Urban North
    4. Continued Northward Migration
    5. The Future of Negro Migration
• PART IV. ECONOMICS
  • Chapter 9. Economic Inequality
    1. Negro Poverty
    2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle
    3. The Value Premises
    4. The Conflict of Valuations
  • Chapter 10. The Tradition of Slavery
    1. Economic Exploitation
    2. Slavery and Caste
    3. The Land Problem
    4. The Tenancy Problem
  • Chapter 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer
    1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
    2. Overpopulation and Soil Erosion
    3. Tenancy, Credit and Cotton
    4. The Boll Weevil
    5. Main Agricultural Classes
    6. The Negro Landowner
    7. Historical Reasons for the Relative Lack of Negro Farm Owners
    8. Tenants and Wage Laborers
    9. The Plantation Tenant
  • Chapter 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the Thirties: Trends and Policies
    1. Agricultural Trends during the ‘Thirties
    2. The Disappearing Sharecropper
    3. The Role of the A.A.A. in Regard to Cotton
    4. A.A.A. and the Negro
    5. The Local Administration of the A.A.A.
    6. Mechanization
    7. Labor Organizations
    8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
    9. Economic Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    10. Social Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    11. Constructive Measures
    12. Farm Security Programs
  • Chapter 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture
    1. Perspective on the Urbanization of the Negro People
    2. In the South
    3. A Closer View
    4. Southern Trends during the Thirties
    5. In the North
    6. A Closer View on Northern Trends
    7. The Employment Hazards of Unskilled Work
    8. The Size of the Negro Labor Force and Negro Employment
    9. Negro and White Unemployment
  • Chapter 14. The Negro in Business, the Professions, Public Service and Other White Collar Occupations
    1. Overview
    2. The Negro in Business
    3. Negro Finance
    4. The Negro Teacher
    5. The Negro Minister
    6. The Negro in Medical Professions
    7. Other Negro Professionals
    8. Negro Officials and White Collar Workers in Public Service
    9. Negro Professionals on the Stage, Screen and Orchestra
    10. Note on Shady Occupations
  • Chapter 15. The Negro in the Public Economy
    1. The Public Budget
    2. Discrimination in Public Service
    3. Education
    4. Public Health
    5. Recreational Facilities
    6. Public Housing Policies
    7. Social Security and Public Assistance
    8. Specialized Social Welfare Programs during the Period After
    9. The Social Security Program
    10. Assistance to Special Groups
    11. Work Relief
    12. Assistance to Youth
    13. General Relief and Assistance in Kind
  • Chapter 16. Income, Consumption and Housing
    1. Family Income
    2. Income and Family Size
    3. The Family Budget
    4. Budget Items
    5. Food Consumption
    6. Housing Conditions
  • Chapter 17. The Mechanics of Economic Discrimination as a Practical Problem
    1. The Practical Problem
    2. The Ignorance and Lack of Concern of Northern Whites
    3. Migration Policy
    4. The Regular Industrial Labor Market in the North
    5. The Problem of Vocational Training
    6. The Self-Perpetuating Color Bar
    7. A Position or “Indifferent Equilibrium”
    8. In the South
  • Chapter 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro
    1. The Wages and Hours Law and the Dilemma of the Marginal Worker
    2. Other Economic Policies
    3. Labor Unions and the Negro
    4. A Weak Movement Getting Strong Powers
  • Chapter 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter
    1. The Negro Wage Earner and the War Boom
    2. A Closer View
    3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War Production
    4. The Negro in the Armed Forces
    5. …And Afterwards?
• PART V. POLITICS
  • Chapter 20. Underlying Factors
    1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue
    2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
    3. The North and the South
    4. The Southern Defense Ideology
    5. The Reconstruction Amendments
    6. Memories of Reconstruction
    7. The Tradition of Illegality
  • Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism
    1. The “Solid South”
    2. Southern Conservatism
    3. Is the South Fascist?
    4. The Changing South
    5. Southern Liberalism
  • Chapter 22. Political Practices Today
    1. The Southern Political Scene
    2. Southern Techniques for Disfranchising the Negroes
    3. The Negro Vote m the South
    4. The Negro in Northern Politics
    5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
  • Chapter 23. Trends and Possibilities
    1. The Negro’s Political Bargaining Power
    2. The Negro’s Party Allegiance
    3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
    4. An Unstable Situation
    5. The Stake of the North
    6. Practical Conclusions
• PART VI. JUSTICE
  • Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice
    1. Democracy and Justice
    2. Relative Equality in the North
    3. The Southern Heritage
  • Chapter 25. The Police and Other Public Contacts
    1. Local Petty Officials
    2. The Southern Policeman
    3. The Policeman in the Negro Neighborhood
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Another Type of Public Contact
  • Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons
    1. The Southern Courts
    2. Discrimination in Court
    3. Sentences and Prisons
    4. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 27. Violence and Intimidation
    1. The Pattern of Violence
    2. Lynching
    3. The Psychopathology of Lynching
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Riots
• PART VII. SOCIAL INEQUALITY
  • Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality
    1. The Value Premise
    2. a. The One-Sidedness of the System of Segregation
    3. The Beginning in Slavery
    4. The Jim Crow Laws
    5. Beliefs Supporting Social Inequality
    6. The Popular Theory of “No Social Equality”
    7. Critical Evaluation of the “No Social Equality” Theory
    8. Attitudes among Different Classes of Whites in the South
    9. Social Segregation and Discrimination in the North
  • Chapter 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination
    1. Facts and Beliefs Regarding Segregation and Discrimination
    2. Segregation and Discrimination in interpersonal Relations
    3. Housing Segregation
    4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
    5. The General Character of Institutional Segregation
    6. Segregation in Specific Types of Institutions
  • Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality
    1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
    2. Increasing Isolation
    3. Interracial Contacts
    4. The Factor of Ignorance
    5. Present Dynamics
• PART VIII. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
  • Chapter 31. Caste and Class
    1. The Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    2. The “Meaning” of the Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    3. The Caste Struggle
    4. Crossing the Caste Line
  • Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure
    1. The Negro Class Order in the American Caste System
    2. Caste Determines Class
    3. Color and Class
    4. The Classes in the Negro Community
• PART IX. LEADERSHIP AND CONCERTED ACTION
  • Chapter 33. The American Pattern of Individual Leadership and Mass Passivity
    1. “Intelligent Leadership”
    2. “Community Leaders”
    3. Mass Passivity
    4. The Patterns Exemplified in Politics and throughout the American Social Structure
  • Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership
    1. Leadership and Caste
    2. The Interests of Whites and Negroes with Respect to Negro leadership
    3. In the North and on the National Scene
    4. The “Glass Plate”
    5. Accommodating Leadership and Class
    6. Several Qualifications
    7. Accommodating Leaders in the North
    8. The Glamour Personalities
  • Chapter 35. The Negro Protest
    1. The Slave Revolts
    2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
    3. The Tuskegee Compromise
    4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
    5. The Protest Is Still Rising
    6. The Shock of the First World War and the Post-War Crisis
    7. The Garvey Movement
    8. Post-War Radicalism among Negro Intellectuals
    9. Negro History and Culture
    10. The Great Depression and the Second World War
  • Chapter 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality
    1. A Mental Reservation
    2. The Struggle Against Defeatism
    3. The Struggle for Balance
    4. Negro Sensitiveness
    5. Negro Aggression
    6. Upper Class Reactions
    7. The “Function” of Racial Solidarity
  • Chapter 37. Compromise Leadership
    1. The Daily Compromise
    2. The Vulnerability of the Negro Leader
    3. Impersonal Motives
    4. The Protest Motive
    5. The Double Role
    6. Negro Leadership Techniques
    7. Moral Consequences
    8. Leadership Rivalry
    9. Qualifications
    10. In Southern Cities
    11. In the North
    12. On the National Scene
  • Chapter 38. Negro Popular Theories
    1. Instability
    2. Negro Provincialism
    3. The Thinking on the Negro Problem
    4. Courting the “Best People Among the Whites”
    5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
    6. Some Critical Observations
    7. The Pragmatic “Truth” of the Labor Solidarity Doctrine
    8. “The Advantages of the Disadvantages”
    9. Condoning Segregation
    10. Boosting Negro Business
    11. Criticism of Negro Business Chauvinism
    12. “Back to Africa”
    13. Miscellaneous Ideologies
  • Chapter 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations
    1. A General American Pattern
    2. Nationalist Movements
    3. Business and Professional Organizations
    4. The National Negro Congress Movement
    5. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
    6. The N.A.A.C.P. Branches
    7. The N.A.A.C.P. National Office
    8. The Strategy of the N.A.A.C.P.
    9. Critique of the N.A.A.C.P.
    10. The Urban League
    11. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
    12. The Negro Organizations during the War
    13. Negro Strategy
  • Chapter 40. The Negro Church
    1. Non-Political Agencies for Negro Concerted Action
    2. Some Historical Notes
    3. The Negro Church and the General American Pattern of
    4. Religious Activity
    5. A Segregated Church
    6. Its Weakness
    7. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 41. The Negro School
    1. Negro Education as Concerted Action
    2. Education in American Thought and Life
    3. The Development of Negro Education in the South
    4. The Whites’ Attitudes toward Negro Education
    5. “Industrial” versus “Classical” Education of Negroes
    6. Negro Attitudes
    7. Trends and Problems
  • Chapter 42. The Negro Press
    1. An Organ for the Negro Protest
    2. The Growth of the Negro Press
    3. Characteristics of the Negro Press
    4. The Controls of the Negro Press
    5. Outlook
• PART X. THE NEGRO COMMUNITY
  • Chapter 43. Institutions
    1. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community
    2. The Negro Family
    3. The Negro Church in the Negro Community
    4. The Negro School and Negro Education
    5. Voluntary Associations
  • Chapter 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community
    1. “Peculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
    2. Crime
    3. Mental Disorders and Suicide
    4. Recreation
    5. Negro Achievements
• PART XI. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA
  • Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem
    1. The Negro Problem and the War
    2. Social Trends
    3. The Decay of the Caste Theory
    4. Negroes in the War Crisis
    5. The War and the Whites
    6. The North Moves Toward Equality
    7. Tension in the South
    8. International Aspects
    9. Making the Peace
    10. America’s Opportunity
• Appendix 1. A Methodological Note on Valuations and Beliefs
  1. The Mechanism of Rationalization
  2. Theoretical Critique of the Concept “Mores”
  3. Valuation Dynamics
• Appendix 2. A Methodological Note on Facts and Valuations in Social Science
  1. Biases in the Research on the American Negro Problem
  2. Methods of Mitigating Biases in Social Science
  3. The History and Logic of the Hidden Valuations in Social Science
  4. The Points of View Adopted in This Book
• Appendix 3. A Methodological Note on the Principle of Accumulation
• Appendix 4. Note on the Meaning of Regional Terms as Used in This Book
• Appendix 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem
• Appendix 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations
  1. General Characteristics of Negro Jobs
  2. Domestic Service
  3. Other Service Occupations
  4. Turpentine Farms
  5. Lumber
  6. The Fertilizer Industry
  7. Longshore Work.
  8. Building Workers
  9. Railroad Workers
  10. Tobacco Workers
  11. Textile Workers
  12. Coal Miners
  13. Iron and Steel Workers
  14. Automobile Workers
  15. The Slaughtering and Meat Packing Industry
• Appendix 7. Distribution of Negro Residences in Selected Cities
• Appendix 8. Research on Caste and Class in a Negro Community
• Appendix 9. Research on Negro Leadership
• Appendix 10. Quantitative Studies of Race Attitudes
  1. Existing Studies of Race Attitudes
  2. The Empirical Study of Valuations and Beliefs
  3. “Personal” and “Political” Opinions
  4. The Practical Study of Race Prejudice
• List of Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Other Material Referred to in This Book
• Numbered Footnotes
• Index

From pages 102-106

If white Americans can believe that Negro Americans belong to a lower biological species than they themselves, this provides a motivation for their doctrine that the white race should be kept pure and that amalgamation should, by all means, be prevented. The theory of the inborn inferiority of the Negro people is, accordingly, used as an argument for the antiamalgamation doctrine. This doctrine, in its turn, has, as we have seen, a central position in the American system of color caste. The belief in biological inferiority is thus another basic support, in addition to the no-social-equality, anti-amalgamation doctrine, of the system of segregation and discrimination. Whereas the anti-amalgamation doctrine has its main importance in the “social” field, the belief in the Negro’s biological inferiority is basic to discrimination in all fields. White Americans have an interest in deprecating the Negro race in so far as they identify themselves with the prevailing system of color caste. They have such an interest, though in a lower degree, even if their only attachment to the caste order is that they do not stand up energetically as individuals and citizens to eradicate it…

…In adhering to this biological rationalization, specified in the six points stated above, the white man meets certain difficulties. A factual difficulty to begin with is that individual Negroes and even larger groups of Negroes often, in spite of the handicaps they encounter, show themselves to be better than they ought to be according to the popular theory. A whole defense system serves to minimize this disturbance of the racial dogma, which insists that all Negroes are inferior. From one point of view, segregation of the Negro people fulfills a function in this defense system. It is, of course, not consciously devised for this purpose, and it serves other purposes as well, but this does not make its defense function less important. Segregation isolates in particular the middle and upper class Negroes,” and thus permits the ordinary white man in America to avoid meeting an educated Negro. The systematic tendency to leave the Negro out when discussing public affairs and to avoid mentioning anything about Negroes in the press except their crimes also serves this purpose. The aggressive and derogatory altitude toward “uppity” Negroes and, in particular, the tendency to relegate all educated Negroes to this group also belongs to the defense system.

Since he has a psychological need to believe the popular theory of Negro racial inferiority, it is understandable why the ordinary white man is disincline to hear about good qualities or achievements of Negroes. ‘The merits of Negro soldiers should not be too warmly praised, especially in the presence of Americans,” reads one of the advices which the French Military Mission, stationed with the American Expeditionary Army during the First World War, circulated but later withdrew. It should be added that white people who work to help the Negro people and to improve race relations see the strategic importance of this factor and direct their work toward spreading information about Negroes of quality among the whites.

Another difficulty has always been the mulatto. White Americans want to keep biological distance from the out-race and will, therefore, be tempted to discount the proportion of mulattoes and believe that a greater part of the Negro people is pure bred than is warranted by the facts. A sort of collective guilt on the part of white people for the large-scale miscegenation, which has so apparently changed the racial character of the Negro people enforces this interest.

The literature on the Negro problem strengthens this hypothesis. Only some exceptional authors, usually Negroes, gave more adequate estimates of the proportion of mixed breeds, and it was left to Hrdlicka and Herskovits in the late ‘twenties to set this whole problem on a more scientific basis. The under-enumeration of mulattoes by the census takers decade after decade and also, until recently, the rather uncritical utilization of this material, indicate a tendency toward bias. The observations of the present author have, practically without exception, indicated that the nonexpert white population shows a systematic tendency grossly to underestimate the number of mulattoes in the Negro population.

It may, of course, be said against this assumption of a hidden purpose that one should not assume the ability of uninformed and untrained persons to distinguish a mulatto from a pure bred Negro. But the facts of historical and actual miscegenation are fairly well known, at least in the South, and are discussed with interest everywhere. And if a wrong estimate systematical goes in the same direction, there is reason to ask for a cause. It has also been observed that the ordinary white American gets disturbed when encountering the new scientific estimates that the great majority of American Negroes are not of pure African descent. Similarly, the ordinary white American is disturbed when he hears that Negroes sometimes pass for white. He wants, and he must want, to keep biological distance.

But the mulatto is a disturbance to the popular race theory not only because of his numbers. The question is also raised: Is the mulatto a deteriorated or an improved Negro? In fact, there seems never to have been popular agreement among white Americans whether the mulatto is worse than the pure bred Negro, or whether he is better because of his partially white ancestry. The former belief should per se strengthen the anti-amalgamation doctrine, in fact, make adherence to it to the interest of the entire society. The second belief can serve a purpose of explaining away Negro accomplishments which are, with few exceptions, made by mulattoes and which then could be ascribed to the white blood. Actually, I have often heard the same man use both arguments…

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Constitutionality Of Miscegenation Statutes: McLaughlin v. Florida

Maryland Law Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (1965)
pages 41-48

Lee M. Miller

The appellants, a Negro man and a white woman, were convicted of violating a Florida statute which proscribed cohabitation between Negro and white persons who are not married to each other. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction. On appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, the appellants claimed: (1) The statute was invalid as a denial of equal protection of the laws since it applied only to members of certain races, and (2) they were denied due process and equal protection of the laws because a Florida law prohibiting interracial marriage prevented them from establishing the defense of common law marriage. The appellants thus hoped to reach the issue of whether the state’s prohibition of interracial marriage contravened the fourteenth amendment. The Supreme Court, basing its decision on the single issue of equal protection (appellants’ first claim), set aside the conviction and invalidated the cohabitation statute. Finding this claim to be dispositive of the case, the Court refrained from expressing any view as to the constitutionality of the law prohibiting interracial marriages.

The provisions of state statutes banning interracial marriage, often called miscegenation statutes, vary considerably, but today all states which have such statutes ban Negro-white marriages, and all declare the proscribed interracial marriages void. Most statutes provide criminal penalties, thus making race an element of a crime. The Maryland statute, for example, proscribes Negro-white and Malay-white marriages and has a mandatory penitentiary sentence.

At one time or another, over half the states had miscegenation statutes. Although these statutes have been repealed by twenty state legislatures, they remain in effect in nineteen other states. Six states have included miscegenation prohibitions in their state constitutions. The highest courts of only two states have held their miscegenationn statutes unconstitutional. Alabama declared its statute unconstitutional in 1872 but reversed itself five years later; California declared its statute unconstitutional in 1948. State courts and lower federal courts have upheld the constitutionality of such statutes. The Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on the issue. In two cases reaching that Court in recent years, certiorari was denied in one and the issue bypassed in the other.”…

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