Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. By Rachel F. Moran [Bartholet Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-18 21:06Z by Steven

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. By Rachel F. Moran [Bartholet Review]

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 33, Number 2 (Autumn 2002)
pages 320–322
DOI: 10.1162/00221950260209039

Elizabeth Bartholet, Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. By Rachel F. Moran (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2oo) 271 pp. $3o.oo.

This thoughtful, provocative book treats an important topic that has received inadequate attention. Moran discusses the unfinished revolution that began with Brown v. Board of Education, in which the nation’s highest court ordered desegregation of the public schools, concluding “that racial boundaries could be broken down and racial hierarchy undone only through interracial contact”. She describes in powerful terms the central role played by the ban on interracial intimacy in the segregationist system of our past, and the myriad restrictions that operate to prevent such intimacy in our theoretically integrationist present. In the end, she makes a nuanced and persuasive case for the good that would come from liberating love and enabling interracial intimacy.

Moran uses history to shine a bright light on the present. She tells in horrifying detail the story of whites’ use of racial barriers to maintain their superior position, not only over blacks but also over Native Americans and successive immigrant groups seen as alien. She also shows how at each stage of historical development, from the days of slavery through abolition through Reconstruction, those in power have seen interracial intimacy as the ultimate threat to racial hierarchy. She describes those resisting change as obsessed with the importance of at least maintaining the color line in this arena, whether through laws preventing interracial marriage and adoption or through the lynching of black men suspected of consorting with white women. She describes those promoting change as feeling compelled to provide reassurance that their kind of racial progress would never mean breaching the all-important ban on interracial marriage. This history provides persuasive proof of the point that she makes explicit interracial intimacy is subversive of the racial order…

Read the entire review here.

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Struck by Lightning? Interracial Intimacy and Racial Justice

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2013-12-29 14:36Z by Steven

Struck by Lightning? Interracial Intimacy and Racial Justice

Human Rights Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 2, May 2003
pages 528-562
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2003.0017

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

Kristina L. Burrows

Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2001), pp. xii, 271. Cloth, $30.

If true love is like lightning, what can romantic choice have to do with racial justice[?].

I. Introduction

Over the last decade, growing attention has been paid to the mixed race population in the United States. Much of the literature on the subject offers compelling stories of the life experiences of persons with African American and white parents. In addition, the controversy over the proper classification of mixed race people for Census 2000 attracted national attention.

Only recently has legal history scholarship begun to analyze the rich history of the legal regulation of racial mixture in the United States and its modern day repercussions. Breaking important new ground in this emerging field, Rachel Moran’s book Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance represents the first comprehensive review of the intricacies of the law and policy of racial mixture, ambitiously surveying wide-ranging legal terrain from the anti-miscegenation laws to transracial adoption. By tackling a much-neglected topic that is central to a full appreciation of civil rights in the modern United States, Interracial Intimacy deserves attention and will likely serve as an influential guide to future research in the field.

As Interracial Intimacy unravels the law’s efforts to regulate and respond to intermarriage, it offers powerful evidence that race is a social and legal construct, a product of our collective mind rather than an immutable biological fact. But Moran goes well beyond that. She demonstrates how intermarriage is inextricably linked to the quest for racial justice. A central theme of Interracial Intimacy is that the prevailing racial segregation in the United States makes intermarriage far less likely than would be the case in an integrated society. The low rate of interracial relationships is a function of pervasive housing, school, and employment segregation, as well as the lack of racial diversity in higher education. Socioeconomic class disparities reflected in residential and employment patterns factor in as well, implicating the connection between race, class, and marriage.

Put simply, people are less likely to select mates of another race if they rarely meet them. Because Americans of different races continue to live separate daily lives, we should expect that people will continue to marry others of their own race. Moran’s reference to love striking “like lightning” makes love seem all the more romantic. However, as we all know, one’s location can affect whether he or she is hit by lightning. So too, location and geography matter for love and romance. The effect of location on love and romance is one of Interracial Intimacy’s powerful insights. Somewhat ironically, Moran proves that, at one level, the segregationists of the old South were entirely correct: segregation and “race mixing” indeed are—and always have been—deeply interrelated. As Gunnar Myrdal observed in his classic study of race relations in the United States, “[e]very single measure [of segregation] is defended as necessary to block ‘social equality’ which in its turn is held necessary to prevent ‘intermarriage.'”

One can only speculate why serious legal scholarship has failed for so long to analyze the connection between love, intimacy, and racial justice. In part, the failure may stem from the view that intensely private and personal decisions are immune from legal purview. By implicating issues of passion and eroticism, intimacy may appear to be beyond rational analysis. Moran’s book breaks the long silence in legal scholarship on this critically important topic.

Interracial Intimacy also identifies deeply perplexing questions worthy of further exploration. Notably, African Americans marry whites much less frequently than Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Native Americans do. Are these other minorities effectively “white,” or at least “whiter,” than African Americans? One can only wonder about the future of interracial marriage between African Americans and whites and what it portends for racial progress.

Ultimately, Interracial Intimacy leaves open whether optimism or pessimism is justified about black/white intermarriage in the next millennium and its impact on civil rights in the United States. In that way, the book proves…

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Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Gay & Lesbian, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2012-05-28 19:11Z by Steven

Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
June 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the “loving” of America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

Table of Contents

  • Introduction Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor
  • Part I: Explaining Loving v. Virginia
    • 1. The legacy of Loving John DeWitt Gregory and Joanna L. Grossman
  • Part II: Historical Antecedents to Loving
    • 2. The ‘love’ of Loving Jason A. Gillmer
    • 3. Loving in Indian territory: tribal miscegenation law in historical perspective Carla Pratt
    • 4. American mestizo: Filipinos and antimiscegenation laws in California Leti Volpp
    • 5. Perez v. Sharp and the limits of Loving: race, marriage, and citizenship reconsidered R. A. Lenhardt
  • Part III: Loving and Interracial Relationships: Contemporary Challenges
    • 6. The road to Loving: the legacy of antimiscegenation law Kevin Noble Maillard
    • 7. Love at the margins: the racialization of sex and the sexualization of race Camille A. Nelson
    • 8. The crime of Loving: Loving, Lawrence, and beyond I. Bennett Capers
    • 9. What’s Loving got to do with it? Law shaping experience and experience shaping law Renée M. Landers
    • 10. Fear of a ‘Brown’ planet or a new hybrid culture? Jacquelyn Bridgeman
  • Part IV: Considering the Limits of Loving
    • 11. Black pluralism in post-Loving America Taunya Lovell Banks
    • 12. Multiracialism and reparations: accounting for political blackness Angelique Davis
    • 13. Finding a Loving home Angela Onwuachi-Willig and Jacob Willig-Onwuachi
  • Part V: Loving outside the United States Borders
    • 14. Racially inadmissible wives Rose Cuison Villazor
    • 15. Flying buttresses Nancy K. Ota
    • 16. Crossing borders: Loving v. Virginia as a story of migration Victor Romero
  • Part VI: Loving and Beyond: Marriage, Intimacy and Diverse Relationships
    • 17. Black vs. gay: centering LBGT people of color in civil marriage debates Adele Morrison
    • 18. Forty years after Loving: a legacy of unintended consequences Rachel F. Moran
    • 19. The end of marriage Tucker Culbertson
    • 20. Afterword Peter Wallenstein
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Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-02-15 03:39Z by Steven

Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

Wisconsin Law Review
2007,  Number 2
Pages 241-281

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

  • I. Introduction
  • II. Making History Rest on Traditional Assumptions
    • A. The Significance of Race
    • B. The Meaning of Marriage
    • C. A Domestic Paradigm of Race and Intimacy
  • III. Undoing Traditional Assumptions: The Unintended Consequences of Loving
    • A. New Frontiers in Race: Multiracialism and Colorblind Segregation
      • 1. The Mixed Promise of Multiracialism
      • 2. The Rise of Colorblind Segregation
    • B. New Paradigms of Intimacy: Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy and the Rise of Marriage-Minded Singlehood
      • 1. The Same-Sex Marriage Movement
      • 2. Marriage-Minded Singlehood
    • C. From the Color Line to the International Border
  • IV. Conclusion

Introduction

If it can take a decade for a person to appreciate the implications of a major life event, it can take even longer to realize the significance of a turning point in the history of a nation. Perhaps for that reason, we hold commemorative events like this one.  An anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on a pivotal moment with distance and detachment and to weigh the consequences more fully than was possible at the time. On this fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, perhaps what is most striking is that a case deemed pathbreaking in its day now seems to have taken so much for granted.  Because the United States Supreme Court interrogated the meaning of neither race nor marriage, Loving has been invoked in a number of later struggles in ways that might have taken the Justices by surprise. This result, of course, is part of the law of unintended consequences: the more that is left unexamined, the more likely that a fresh look will reveal implications beyond those originally contemplated.

Here, I will explore Loving’s unintended consequences by considering why the Court took so much for granted and how the opinion later was deployed in unexpected ways. After briefly examining the facts and holdings in the case, I will show that the Justices accepted monoracial categories as a given, despite evidence of multiracial complexity. The Court’s treatment of race reflected the need to implement desegregation orders that turned on clearcut racial distinctions. The Justices also regarded marriage as a longstanding tradition. Already under attack for conjuring up unenumerated rights that did not appear in the Constitution, the Court was loath to suggest that marriage was anything other than an uncontroversial historical institution.

Ironically, the Court’s assumptions about race and marriage have been directly subverted by those who most openly lay claim to Loving’s legacy. Proponents of multiracialism and advocates of same-sex marriage argue that their reform proposals are a natural outgrowth of the Court’s conceptualization of freedom and equality. At the same time, Loving’s subtler consequences have gone largely unaddressed. The case arguably ushered in a jurisprudential philosophy that treats colorblindness and ongoing segregation as compatible. In addition, the decision entrenched the primacy of marriage in the law’s recognition of close personal relationships. Finally, Loving acquiesced in the presumption that romance happens only among Americans and so the decision has been of little import in dignifying and protecting the intimate attachments of noncitizens. Such a complex legacy demonstrates why a perfectly factual account of Loving simply will not do, and so it may take some time to appreciate the consequences.

Read the entire article here.

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Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Native Americans and Latinos

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2011-08-08 20:33Z by Steven

In contrast to Blacks and Asians, anti-miscegenation laws were seldom applied to Native Americans and never mentioned Latinos. The reasons for the lenient treatment of Latinos and Native Americans are quite similar. In both cases, these groups first came into contact with Whites when frontiers were being settled. At the outset, Whites had much to gain by forming friendly alliances with Indian tribes or Mexican natives. On occasion, these alliances could be cemented through intermarriage. Consider, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrived in northern Mexico to make their fortunes in the early to mid-1800s. Mexico, newly freed from Spanish rule, hoped to capitalize on the sparsely populated furthermost reaches of its territory by attracting foreign investors. However, Mexican officials did not want Anglos simply to come to their country, exploit the land, and leave with their fortunes. Instead, the government wanted to encourage permanent settlement, and an excellent way to do this was to reward those who put down roots there. As a result, Mexico offered naturalization opportunities and corresponding trade advantages to Anglos who married Mexican women. Indeed, the expectation was that Anglo settlers would be loyal to Mexican wives, not manipulate or abandon them after using them to personal advantage…

Rachel F. Moran, “Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage,” Hofstra Law Review, Volume 32, Issue 4, (2004): 1663-1679.

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Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-08-06 22:03Z by Steven

Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage

Hofstra Law Review
Volume 32, Issue 4 (2004)
pages 1663-1679

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Wislawa Szymborska

If true love is for the lucky few, then for the rest of us there is the far more mundane institution of marriage. Traditionally, love has sat in an uneasy relationship to marriage, and only in the last century has romantic love emerged as the primary, if not exclusive, justification for a wedding in the United States. In part, the triumph of love reflects a society increasingly committed to an ethic of individualism, including individualism of the romantic variety, so that marriage is no longer presumptively a tool for the State to advance the general welfare. In the quest for individual liberation, women have gained access to education and employment that increasingly emancipates them from dependency on a husband to achieve economic security.

Because marriage has grown to be a matter of personal choice, the number of restrictions on permissible partners has steadily declined. Even so, some official regulation persists, and we can learn as much about the meaning of matrimony by looking at who is excluded as by looking at who is eligible. To that end, I want to explore the lessons of anti-miscegenation laws, state statutes that once prohibited interracial marriage. At one time, these statutes were widespread, but they were not identical in their coverage. The laws universally targeted relationships between Blacks and Whites, and a number of the provisions, particularly those in Western states, banned unions between Asians and Whites. A few restricted intermarriage with Native Americans, but none mentioned Latinos. The laws had a remarkable longevity. Even though individuals enjoyed increasing freedom to choose a mate free of state and community interference, these statutes remained valid until 1967 when the United States Supreme Court struck them down as unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia.

Although anti-miscegenation laws generally have been analyzed as racial legislation, they also can tell us a great deal about intimacy. These provisions have certainly been used to define and entrench racial difference, but they are also a means to set the boundaries of sexual decency and marital propriety. Here, I will use the comparative experience of Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to illustrate some of the laws’ implications for race and identity. I will then place the statutes in the context of larger developments regarding the regulation of sex and marriage to show how they reflected anxieties about wayward lust and forbidden desire.

I. THE ROLE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAWS IN RACIAL SEPARATION AND STRATIFICATION

In the American mythology of racial segregation, there is an assumption that racial groups have always lived separately and that there is an almost natural inevitability about this arrangement. In fact, in the earliest years of settling the American colonies, Black slaves often worked side by side with White indentured servants. In these close, cooperative arrangements, interracial attraction was by no means a rarity. Relationships across the color line complicated social boundaries between Black and White, slave and free. Whites who, at least as a formal matter, had freely chosen a temporary contract of hard labor did not seem so very different from Blacks who had been sold into prevented race-mixing that undermined both the sanctity of free White labor and the legitimacy of Blacks’ status as property.

As the institution of slavery was consolidated, anti-miscegenation laws assumed another valuable purpose. They defined a racial hierarchy in which Whites were free and Blacks were not. Although many statutes banned both interracial marriage and fornication, White male slaveholders regularly flouted the laws. They could demand sex from their Black female slaves and inflict terrible punishment, including rape and sale on the auction block, if the women resisted. A former Virginia slave remembers the fate of another slave woman named Sukie:

“Ole Marsa was always tryin’ to make Sukie his gal.” One day when she was making lye soap and he approached her, “she gave him a shove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’ Soap. Soap was near to bilin’, an’ it burn him near to death. . . Marsa never did bother slave gals no mo’.” But a few days later Sukie was sent to the auction block.

In fact, interracial sex was so common that a new dilemma arose: How should the mixed-race offspring be identified? Traditionally, a child’s status was based on the father’s heritage, but a patrilineal rule would mean that most children of Black and White origin would be White and free. Such a result would once again complicate the line between Black and White, slave and free, as masters who enjoyed their license with female slaves produced emancipated mulattoes, not subject to the control of White owners and potentially loyal to Black mothers still in bondage. The solution was to change the rule of descendible privilege. Instead of determining a child’s status based on the father’s identity, a matrilineal principle of identity would be applied. Moreover, a one-drop rule evolved to ensure that even remote African ancestry identified a child as Black, not White. The children of sex across the color line would be Black and nearly always slaves. They could be emancipated only if their White father and master chose to do so, and they could never escape their Blackness…

…While anti-miscegenation laws were used to define racial difference and create racial hierarchy between Blacks and Whites in colonial America and later the antebellum South, the statutes served a distinct function when applied to Asian immigrants who arrived on the West Coast, particularly California, in the mid- to late 1800s. The Chinese were the first to arrive in substantial numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century when gold was discovered. Under the immigration laws, the Chinese were treated as sojourners, laborers who came temporarily to work and then returned to their home country. This migrant labor force was overwhelmingly male. In 1852, only seven of 11,794 Chinese were female. By 1870, Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women by a margin of 14 to 1.8 Because the men were here to sweat but not to stay, the United States government made clear that as unassimilable, non-White foreigners, they were ineligible for citizenship. Federal officials discouraged immigration of Chinese women because they did not want the sojourners to put down roots, form families, and produce children who would be Americans by birth….

…In contrast to Blacks and Asians, anti-miscegenation laws were seldom applied to Native Americans and never mentioned Latinos. The reasons for the lenient treatment of Latinos and Native Americans are quite similar. In both cases, these groups first came into contact with Whites when frontiers were being settled. At the outset, Whites had much to gain by forming friendly alliances with Indian tribes or Mexican natives. On occasion, these alliances could be cemented through intermarriage. Consider, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrived in northern Mexico to make their fortunes in the early to mid-1800s. Mexico, newly freed from Spanish rule, hoped to capitalize on the sparsely populated furthermost reaches of its territory by attracting foreign investors. However, Mexican officials did not want Anglos simply to come to their country, exploit the land, and leave with their fortunes. Instead, the government wanted to encourage permanent settlement, and an excellent way to do this was to reward those who put down roots there. As a result, Mexico offered naturalization opportunities and corresponding trade advantages to Anglos who married Mexican women. Indeed, the expectation was that Anglo settlers would be loyal to Mexican wives, not manipulate or abandon them after using them to personal advantage. In a diary of his Western travels, Matt Field, a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, made these expectations clear to his readers when he described the sad tale of Maria Romero, who fell in love with a charming but dissolute Anglo adventurer who deserted her and her child by him. As Field wrote, “when subsequently she heard that [her lover] had designedly abandoned her, and had gone forever back to the United States, her reason failed, and poor Maria, the beauty of Taos, became a lunatic.” Maria had clearly expected marriage, not betrayal. In keeping with the commitment to permanent settlement in Mexico, the children of mixed marriages often spoke Spanish, observed Mexican cultural traditions, and Hispanicized their non-Spanish surnames…

Read the entire article here.

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Loving: The Significance of Race

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2009-12-19 01:11Z by Steven

The Loving opinion treated race as a monolithic and meaningful category, even though the realities of the case itself subverted this account. The litigation arose in Caroline County, Virginia, a place called the “passing capital of America” because so many light-skinned blacks were mistaken for whites. In addition, the Jeters made clear that “Richard [wasn’t] the first white person in our family,” suggesting that Mildred’s own racial background was complex.

Rachel F. Moran, “Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences,” (Wisconsin Law Review, Issue 2, 2007), 241-281. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265218010_Loving_and_the_Legacy_of_Unintended_Consequences.

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Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance

Posted in Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2009-12-09 18:46Z by Steven

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance

The University of Chicago Press
2001
232 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780226536637

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

As late as the 1960s, states could legally punish minorities who either had sex with or married persons outside of their racial groups. In this first comprehensive study of the legal regulation of interracial relationships, Rachel Moran grapples with the consequences of that history, candidly confronting its profound effects on not only conceptions of race and identity, but on ideas about sex, marriage, and family.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • 1. Insights from Interracial Intimacy
  • 2. Antimiscegenation Laws and the Enforcement of Racial Boundaries
  • 3. Subverting Racial Boundaries: Identity, Ambiguity, and Interracial Intimacy
  • 4. Antimiscegenation Laws and Norms of Sexual and Marital Propriety
  • 5. Judicial Review of Antimiscegenation Laws: The Long Road to Loving
  • 6. Race and Romanticism: The Persistence of Racial Endogamy after Loving
  • 7. Race and the Family: The Best Interest of the Child in Interracial Custody and Adoption Disputes
  • 8. Race and Identity: The New Multiracialism
  • 9. The Lessons of Interracial Intimacy
  • Notes
  • Index
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Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2009-12-09 18:23Z by Steven

Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change

Berkeley Women’s Law Journal
University of California, Berkeley Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series
2002
pp. 153-164

Stephanie M. Wildman, Professor of Law and Director of Center for Social Justice and Public Service
Santa Clara University School of Law

Moran, Rachel F.  (2001).  Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
271 pp.

In her review essay Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change, Stephanie Wildman examines Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance by Rachel F. Moran. Moran’s book investigates the so-called private landscape of race in the context of interracial intimacy. Moran urges the connection between our personal, private views of race and racial issues and the policy decisions society makes in the public realm. Moran explores historic antimiscegenation laws and their role in establishing societal norms and customs, the significance of race in daily life, the legal decisions leading to Loving v. Virginia, and the role of race in custody and adoption decisions. Wildman observes that interracial gay and lesbian relationships represent another area usually viewed as private, yet which implicates the societal landscape. Recognition of the public aspect of personal choice is a necessary element in the fight against bias and the movement toward social change.

Read the entire review/essay here.

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Race Law Stories

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Slavery, United States on 2009-12-09 17:55Z by Steven

Race Law Stories

Foundation Press
2008
624 pages
ISBN-13: 9781599410012

Edited by

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Devon Wayne Carbado, Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Race Law Stories brings to life well-known and not-so-well known legal opinions—hidden gems—that address slavery, Native American conquest, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, Japanese American internment, immigration, affirmative action, voting rights and employment discrimination. Each story goes beyond legal opinions to explore the historical context of the cases and the worlds of the ordinary people and larger-than-life personalities who drove the litigation process. The book’s multiracial and interdisciplinary approach makes it useful for courses on race and the law and Critical Race Theory both inside and outside the law school as well as for undergraduate and graduate courses in ethnic studies. Each story illuminates the role that the law has played in both creating and combating racial inequality. Race Law Cases, an edited collection of the cases discussed in the Race Law Stories, will be available as a supplement in 2008.

View the Table of Contents here.
Read the introduction here.

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