Mixed Race Studies

What the “Loving Day” 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Loving v. Virginia Court Decision Really Need – A Challenge to Ongoing White Supremacy

The Huffington Post
2017-06-11

Tanya K. Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law

Monday, June 12, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision which invalidated interracial marriage bans in the United States. Recently, the Pew Research Center reported that since the 1967 Loving decision the rate of intermarriage has increased more than five fold, from 3% of newlyweds who were intermarried to 17% in 2015. In recognition of this increase, “Loving Day” annual events celebrate the court decision. Primarily organized by multiracial persons as social events, communities across the nation gather on Loving Day to celebrate the existence of multiracial families. The celebrations are part of a larger campaign to have the federal government create an official Loving Day federal holiday.

No other Supreme Court case, let alone a civil rights case, has its own designated federal holiday. However entire multiracial community websites are dedicated to lobbying the government for a Loving Day holiday. This is because much more is at stake for these activists than commemorating a legal case. Validating mixed-race families and in particular multiracial persons, is the fundamental aim of the Loving Day federal holiday campaign. However, the rhetoric of mixed-race racial distinctiveness used by the campaign has begun to be drawn into judicial questioning of racial integration policies in ways that counter Loving Day celebrations of diversity…

Read the entire article here.

No, Interracial Love is Not “Saving America”

Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media
2017-06-12

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

This year is the 50th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the famous Supreme Court case that officially overturned state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Predictably, this has been accompanied by a flurry of events, films, articles, and even songs celebrating this moment as a milestone in the history of America’s journey toward racial equality.

At a mixed race conference I recently attended, larger-than-life photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving, the white man and black woman whose relationship inspired the court case in 1965, adorned the walls. There and elsewhere, the Lovings were portrayed as “heroes” whose love valiantly overcame the racism of their time.

Just today, the New York Times proclaimed that interracial love was “saving America.”.

Statistics show that interracial marriages in the U.S. are on the rise, and this undoubtedly reflects a shift in attitudes toward race in the American population overall. However, there are several reasons why using interracial marriage as proof of racial progress in our society is not only misleading, but harmful.

First, state recognition of partnership often functions as a superficial symbol of progress, obscuring deeper issues of violence and inequality for the most marginalized members of a community. For example, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, many heralded this as proof that queer people had finally been accepted into mainstream society…

Read the entire article here.

Does Growing Population of Multiracial Kids Portend a Future with Less Racism?

WVTF Public Radio
Roanoke, Virginia
2017-06-13

Sandy Hausman, WVTF/RADIO IQ Charlottesville Bureau Chief

A growing number of families in this country include people of different races. Credit NPR

Fifty years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws that prevented people of different races from marrying in Virginia.  Now, one of every six newlyweds choose partners of a different race or ethnicity.  So does this mean America is on the road to ending racism?  And how do mixed race kids think of themselves.  Those questions puzzled a UVA alum whose new book offers intriguing answers.  Sandy Hausman has that story.

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl grew up in rural Virginia where race consciousness was strong.  Back then, the U.S. census bureau recorded only a handful of possible races for residents of the state.  Now, however, that has changed.

“Now we have 63 possible racial categories,”  Strmic-Pawl says.

And looking at the younger members of our population, the assistant professor of sociology was startled by the number of kids who don’t fit neatly into a single racial category…

[Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl is the author of Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials.]

Read the entire story here. Listen to the story (00:02:14) here.

Please Don’t Ever Call Me Or My Family ‘Basically White’

TIME
2017-06-12

Rasika W. Boice

Her blue eyes are childhood summers doing backward dives into the pool and boogie boarding with reckless abandon on the crests of chilly New England waves — I have the scars on my upper thighs to prove it. I’d happily drown in her piercing indigos, so different from my deep browns.

“She has your eye shape,” some say, looking from her to me, from me to her. They struggle to make the connection. The colors don’t match, not only of our eyes but also of our skin, she more of a latte to my coffee with skim.

As I help her up the slide at the playground, I wonder how many question if I’m her mother or nanny. And on bad days, I hope they decide nanny. That way, she’ll be safe from the ones who yell “Go home!” and “You don’t belong here!” Or worse…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Marriage Before And After The Historic Loving Decision

WGBH News
WGBH 89.7 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2017-06-13

Sally Jacobs

The family in the yard of their Scituate home from left to right: Pamela McCoy, Rayna’s mother, Harris, Rayna, London, Miles and Dominic. Credit: Courtesy of the Mackay family.

This story is part two of a special three-part series on interracial marriage. It was produced in collaboration with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

Winston Cox and Trudy Kofford were married late on a February afternoon in 1966. She was 22-years-old, a green-eyed dreamer fresh from the hills of Oregon. He was 29, an ambitious doctoral candidate from Jamaica, with a wiry build.

Trudy, who is white, wore a wool dress with a rounded straw hat in honor of her mother, one of a tiny number of family members present for the couple that day. Her father had vowed to disown her if she married Cox, a black man. Minutes before the ceremony began, Trudy’s mother leaned over and whispered in Winston’s ear.

“The mother, she said, ‘Listen, if her daddy ever sees you he’ll kill you,’” Winston recalled. “She was very angry when she met me.”

Such opposition to interracial marriage was not uncommon back when Winston and Trudy took the bold step of marrying across racial lines, one year before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision — Loving v. Virginia — that struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Fifty years later, some things have decidedly changed while others have definitely not…

Winston Cox and Trudy Kofford on their wedding day, Feb. 4, 1966, in San Luis Obispo, CA. Photo Credit: Courtesy

…Although Trudy has some Native-American blood, she had never met a black person growing up in Joseph, Oregon. In a way, Winston was just as naïve. He had grown up in Jamaica at a time of political upheaval, but had little racial awareness. There just weren’t many white people around during his childhood.

Still, though, they got married in 1966, one year before the Loving court decision would strike down laws nationwide prohibiting marriage between races. The ceremony was held in a mission in San Luis Obispo, California, where Winston had attended college. (California legalized interracial marriage in 1948.) Although they had many differences stemming from their upbringing, they shared a passion for social justice.

“We were Communists together,” said Trudy. “We were political. We studied Mao, and the Chinese Revolution.”

So much so, that when they had their second child in 1970 they called her Fanshen. It’s a Chinese word that means turning over. But it didn’t take long for race to come between them. By the time Fanshen was born, Winston had been kicked out of restaurants, barred from bathrooms and humiliated. As the politics of the decade grew more extreme, he grew an Afro and turned to the Black Panthers…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story here.

‘We Are Not Unusual Anymore’: 50 Years of Mixed-Race Marriage in U.S.

The New York Times
2017-06-11

Jennifer Medina, National Correspondent
Los Angeles, California

Rosina and Leon Watson last week in St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Oakland, Calif. They were married in the church in 1950, 17 years before Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court case allowing interracial marriage. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

OAKLAND, Calif. — For their first date, in 1949, Leon Watson and Rosina Rodriquez headed to the movie theater. But each entered separately. First went Ms. Rodriquez, a fair-skinned woman who traces her roots to Mexico. Mr. Watson, who is black, waited several minutes before going in and sitting next to her.

“We always did it,” Mr. Watson said one recent afternoon. “They looked at you like you were in a zoo. We just held our heads high and kept going. If we knew there would be a problem, we stayed away from it.”

When they married in Oakland in 1950, mixed-race marriage had just become legal in California, the result of a lawsuit that reached the State Supreme Court. They are among the oldest living interracial couples legally married in the United States. It would be nearly two decades before all couples like them across the country were allowed to marry.

On Monday, they will mark the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court case that overturned antimiscegenation laws nationwide. Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man, had been sentenced to a year in a Virginia prison for marrying each other. The case would serve as a basis for the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage…

Read the entire article here.

Key facts about race and marriage, 50 years after Loving v. Virginia

Pew Research Center
2017-06-12

Kristen Bialik

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Loving v. Virginia case that marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the country. Intermarriage has increased steadily since then: One-in-six U.S. newlyweds (17%) were married to a person of a different race or ethnicity in 2015, a more than fivefold increase from 3% in 1967. Among all married people in 2015 (not just those who recently wed), 10% are now intermarried – 11 million in total.

Here are more key findings from Pew Research Center about interracial and interethnic marriage and families on the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision…

Read the entire article here.

Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia

Pew Research Center
2017-05-18

Gretchen Livingston, Senior Researcher

Anna Brown, Research Analyst

One-in-six newlyweds are married to someone of a different race or ethnicity

In 2015, 17% of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, marking more than a fivefold increase since 1967, when 3% of newlyweds were intermarried, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.2 In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case ruled that marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the country. Until this ruling, interracial marriages were forbidden in many states.

More broadly, one-in-ten married people in 2015 – not just those who recently married – had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. This translates into 11 million people who were intermarried. The growth in intermarriage has coincided with shifting societal norms as Americans have become more accepting of marriages involving spouses of different races and ethnicities, even within their own families.

The most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds. Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%. White newlyweds, too, have experienced a rapid increase in intermarriage, with rates rising from 4% to 11%. However, despite this increase, they remain the least likely of all major racial or ethnic groups to marry someone of a different race or ethnicity.

Asian and Hispanic newlyweds are by far the most likely to intermarry in the U.S. About three-in-ten Asian newlyweds3 (29%) did so in 2015, and the share was 27% among recently married Hispanics. For these groups, intermarriage is even more prevalent among the U.S. born: 39% of U.S.-born Hispanic newlyweds and almost half (46%) of U.S.-born Asian newlyweds have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity…

Read the entire article here. Read the entire report here.

The Head of the Census Resigned. It Could Be as Serious as James Comey

TIME
2017-05-12

Haley Sweetland Edwards

John Thompson, Director, U.S. Census Bureau U.S. Census Bureau

In a week dominated by President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, you could be forgiven for missing the imminent departure of another, less prominent federal official.

Yet the news this week that John H. Thompson, the director of the Census Bureau, has abruptly resigned is arguably as consequential to the future of our democracy. That’s because the Census Bureau, while less flashy than the FBI, plays a staggeringly important role in both U.S. elections and an array of state and federal government functions.

“At the very heart of the Census is nothing less than political power and money,” said Terri Ann Lowenthal, who served as the staff director of the House census oversight subcommittee before becoming a consultant on census policy and operational issues. “It is the basis, the very foundation, of our democracy and the Constitution’s promise of equal representation.”

The results of the decennial Census—the next will be in 2020—will determine how state and federal political districts are drawn; which Americans are “counted” for representation; and how federal dollars, many of which are allocated on a per capita basis, are spent…

Read the entire article here.

Departure of U.S. Census director threatens 2020 count

Science
2017-05-09

Jeffrey Mervis

John Thompson will leave the Census Bureau on 30 June. U.S. Census Bureau

John Thompson is stepping down next month as director of the U.S. Census Bureau. His announcement today comes less than 1 week after a congressional spending panel grilled him about mounting problems facing the agency in preparing for the 2020 decennial census. And Thompson’s pending retirement is weighing heavily on the U.S. statistical community.

Thompson is leaving halfway through a 1-year extension of a term that expired last December. His departure will create what a 2011 law was expressly designed to avoid—a leadership vacuum during a crucial time in the 10-year life cycle of the census, the nation’s largest civilian undertaking. The immediate concern is who the Trump administration will appoint, and how soon it will act…

…Ken Prewitt, who led the agency from 1998 to 2001, worries that a long delay in naming a well-qualified replacement for Thompson could be the first step of a long, steep decline in the quality of the federal statistic system, which spans 13 agencies. “That system is fragile, and it wouldn’t take much to damage it severely,” says Prewitt, a professor of social affairs at Columbia University. “My real fear is that they don’t care enough to do a good job with the 2020 census. And then after doing a bad job, they decide to let the private sector take over.”…

Read the entire article here.