Mixed Race Studies

The Love Story That Made Marriage a Fundamental Right

Color Lines
2011-04-27

Asraa Mustufa

The Tribeca Film Festival is under way in New York, and one featured documentary delves into the story behind the landmark civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down Jim Crow laws meant to prevent people from openly building families across racial lines. 

Mildred and Richard Loving were an interracial couple that married in Washington, D.C., in 1958. Shortly after re-entering their hometown in Virginia, the pair was arrested in their bedroom and banished from the state for 25 years. The Lovings would spend the next nine years in exile, surreptitiously visiting family and friends back home in Virginia—and fighting for the right to return legally. Their case wound its way to the Supreme Court and, in 1967, the Court condemned Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act as a measure “designed to maintain white supremacy” that violated due process and equal protection. The ruling deemed the anti-miscegenation laws in effect in 16 states at the time unconstitutional. However, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until the year 2000 to officially remove language prohibiting interracial marriage from their state constitutions.

The landmark case has returned to popular consciousness in recent years as states have debated same-sex marriage rights. Marriage equality advocates have pointed to the Lovings’ fight as a foundational part of American history, establishing marriage as a basic civil right. But for decades it was left to the footnotes of civil rights history, overshadowed by blockbuster cases like Brown vs. Board of Education.

Director Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story” aims to deepen public understanding of not just the case but the Loving family itself. The filmmakers recreate their story through interviews with their friends, community members and the attorneys fighting their case. Buirski and her team revived unused footage of the Lovings from 45 years ago, including home movies, and dug up old photographs to bring the couple to life. As a result, the film is as much an engaging love story as it is a history of racist lawmaking. 

“The Loving Story” is making the film festival rounds this year and will air on HBO in February 2012. I spoke with Buirski after the film’s Tribeca screening this week…

Read the entire article here.

The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States

Praeger Publishers
May 2013
195 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38569-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-313-38570-4

Eric J. Bailey, Professor of Anthropology and Public Health
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina

This unique and important book investigates what it means to be multiracial and/or multiethnic in the United States, examining the issues involved from personal, societal, and cultural perspectives.

The number of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to more than one race has gone up 33 percent since 2000. But what does it mean to identify oneself as multiracial? How does it impact such basics as race relations, health care, and politics? Equally important, what does this burgeoning population mean for U.S. businesses and institutions?

More and more, the idea of America as a melting pot is becoming a reality. Written from the perspective of multiracial citizens, The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States brings to light the values, beliefs, opinions, and patterns among these populations. It assesses group identity and social recognition by others, and it communicates how multiracial individuals experience America’s reaction to their increasing numbers.

Comprehensive and far-reaching, this thoughtful compendium covers the cultural history of multiracials in America. It looks at multiracial families today, at rural and urban multiracial populations, and at multiracial physical features, health disparities, bone and marrow transplant issues, adoption matters, as well as multiracial issues in other countries. Multiracial entertainers, athletes, and politicians are considered, as well. Among the book’s most important topics is multiracial health and health care disparity. Finally, the book makes clear how America’s current majority institutions, organizations, and corporations must change their relationship with multiracial and multiethnic populations if they wish to remain viable and competitive.

Gender, Mixed Race Relations and Dougla Identities in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction

6th International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations
Goldsmiths, University of London
Centre for Caribbean Studies
2011-06-24 through 2011-06-25

Christine Vogt-William
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

Once a pejorative term in Hindi meaning ‘bastard’, dougla is used nowadays to designate those of African and Indian parentage in the Caribbean. Relations between African and Indian communities in the Caribbean have been fraught, due to the divide-and-rule policies implemented by the colonial plantocracy, missionaries and state regimes, in order to discourage interracial solidarity and cooperation. Vijay Prashad observes: “the descendants of the coolies and the slaves have struggled against the legacy of both social fractures and of the mobility of some at the expense of others“ (Prashad, 2001: 95). Yet, despite this there were transcultural alliances between Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans. However the figure of the dougla was considered by many middle class Indians as a potential threat to Indian cultural coherence and by extension to a powerful political lobby under the demographic category of “East Indian” (Prashad, 2001: 83). Indo-Caribbean culture, history and literature cannot be examined without acknowledging the transcultural aspects of dougla heritages.

The focus of my paper will be on how gender and mixed race relations are addressed in novels by Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writers Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. The genre of the novel could be read as an adequate site to address the interrogation of hybrid identities with a view to engendering a Caribbean feminist dougla poetics, since literature is “a medium that is not understood to be exclusively the cultural capital of Indo- or Afro-Trinidadians” (Puri, 2004: 206). Gender roles and expectations from both Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean communities inform and complicate racial relations—factors which are rendered even more complex due to the histories of slavery and indentured labour and how these served to shape Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women’s self-perceptions. In view of these histories, I read The Swinging Bridge (Espinet) and He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo) with the aim of charting spaces to articulate alternative perspectives normally disallowed by hegemonic racial representations (Afro-Creole and Indian “Mother Culture”), which also repress the gender and class inequalities within Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities. These spaces then might provide the dougla potential of disrupting dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, thus allowing for specifically transcultural feminist interventions in prevalent gender and race imagery.

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