Mixed Race Studies

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism.

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Mario L. Barnes, “The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law,” Indiana Law Journal, Volume 87: Issue1 (Spring 2012): 328.

The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
pages 328-348
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

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

Mario L. Barnes, Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008, prompted many declarations from journalists and commentators about the arrival of a post-racial society, a society in which race is no longer meaningful. For many, the fact that a self-identified black man had obtained the most prominent, powerful, and prestigious job in the United States symbolized the end of an era in which Blacks and other racial minorities could make legitimate claims about the harmful effects of racism. In fact, on the night of the election, conservative talk show host Bill Bennett proclaimed that Blacks would have no more excuses for any failures or unattained successes. Black actor Will Smith essentially agreed with Bennett, proclaiming the following: “I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down.”

Along the same lines, many conservatives pointed to Obama’s election as a symbol of a racism-free society when they initiated constitutional challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the fact that Obama had earned only one in four votes from Whites in areas covered by section 5 of the Act while earning nearly half of all votes from Whites nationally, Texas lawyer Gregory Coleman argued that the Voting Rights Act was basically irrelevant in today’s society; to him and other conservatives, Obama’s election as president demonstrated as much. Coleman declared, “The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African American president is far different than when [the Voting Rights Act] was first enacted in 1965.”

Overall, many pondered whether Obama’s election signaled a new day for Blacks. The fact that Obama was biracial only made the symbolism stronger. The son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, Obama represented a break from our nation’s troubled past with race and racism, not just because of his ability to become president but also because of his individual racial background.

In this Article, we explore the proclamations that have been made about an emerging “post-racial” society within the context of workplace anti-discrimination law. Specifically, as the title of our panel for this symposium asks, we inquire: What is the significance of having a biracial, black-white president (or more specifically, the first self-identified black president) to the enforcement of anti-discrimination law? What impact, if any, has President Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and election as president had on discrimination in the workplace?

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism…

Read the entire article here.

2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law by Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig: “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

University of California, Davis
School of Law
Kalmanovitz Appellate Courtroom
2011-11-08, 16:00-18:00 PST (Local Time)
Run Time: 01:05:58

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

The 2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law features Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig. She delivers a lecture entitled, “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig explores the social and legal meanings of the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case by examining its various lessons regarding law and society’s joint role in framing the normative ideal of family as monoracial.

The Rhinelander trial of 1925 involved a lawsuit in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Rhinelander, for an annulment based on fraud. Leonard alleged that Alice claimed to be white when she was actually “of colored blood.” Legend has it that the two were madly in love, but Rhinelander’s father encouraged the annulment proceeding because he did not approve of the relationship.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig analyzes the case as a representation of the simultaneously tragic and inspiring story about race and race relations in the United States.

A former member of the UC Davis law faculty, Professor Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She specializes in the areas of Employment Discrimination, Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Race and the Law.

Established in 1981 in memory of Professor Brigitte M. Bodenheimer, this endowed lecture brings scholars and practitioners to King Hall to discuss recent developments affecting the family.

…Finally, Rhinelander teaches us about the limited spaces that are available in society for recognizing families that are multiracial. Like many multiracial families, Alice’s family, the Joneses, existed within an American landscape that had no recognized place for them and their lives. Just like the one-drop rule was applied to individuals, it was applied to the Jones family during and after the Rhinelander saga. In other words, Elizabeth Jones’s legal and social classification as a white individual became “implicated by [the] brownness” of her family members, and the reality of her family’s existence as one that lived between two worlds, one white and one black, was erased. It had no place in 1920s New York society, and it placed them nowhere within the spectrum of American families. Today, this sense of family as defined by race persists. The lesson is so clear that even young children understand it. Just ask my husband, who is white and who is often asked as he drops off or picks up our children, who are racially mixed, black and white children, “why he does not match.” Or ask my daughter, who even at the age four, understood that there was no place for her family, often declaring that she wanted to paint her daddy “brown like Davey’s dad.” As Heidi Durrow has explained about the continuing “spaceless-ness” of interracial families in our society, “[w]hen race acts as the primary kinship identifier, the reality of [the multiracial] family dissolves.” It is important that we continue to explore and study cases like Rhinelander case, which serve as stark reminder of this dissolving multiracial family, and our need to create spaces for it…

Angela Onwuachi-Willig,  “A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Identity, Marriage, and Family,” California Law Review, Volume 95, 2007, University of Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07-27.

A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Marriage, Identity, and Family

California Law Review
Volume 95, Issue 6 (2007)
pages 2393-2458

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

During the mid-1920s, the story of the courtship, marriage, and separation of Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard Kip Rhinelander astounded the American public, especially the citizens of New York and black Americans across the country.  Alice, a chambermaid and the racially mixed daughter of English immigrants who had worked as servants on a large estate in Bradford, England, had committed the social faux pas of falling in love with and marrying Leonard Kip Rhinelander, the son of a white multi-millionaire who descended from the French Huguenots.  Or rather, as certain arguments from Leonard’s trial attorney Isaac Mills and later the jury’s verdict would together suggest, Leonard had committed a social offense by “knowingly” loving and marrying Alice, a colored woman.

Scandal arose about the marriage of Alice and Leonard when a story with the title “Rhinelanders’ Son Marries Daughter of a Colored Man” ran in the Standard Star of New Rochelle on November 13, 1924.  Two weeks later, on November 26, 1924, Leonard filed for an annulment of his marriage to Alice. In his Complaint, Leonard alleged that Alice had misrepresented her race to him by improperly leading him to believe that she was white, “not colored,” before their nuptials. New York law did not ban interracial marriages between Blacks and Whites at the time; thus, Alice and Leonard’s marriage was not automatically void.  In the state of New York, the law did not identify interracial marriages as so odious to public policy that they were legally impossible; however, fraud as to a spouse’s race before marriage signaled that there had been no meeting of the minds between husband and wife. Given the importance of racial classifications and their corresponding status in society, New York courts readily accepted knowledge about a spouse’s race to be a factor so crucial to the understanding of the marital contract that fraud about it rendered the marriage voidable and thus eligible to be annulled from its start.  In other words, the primary basis for recognizing knowledge of a spouse’s race as a material fact that went to the essence of marriage, a requirement for annulling voidable marriages based on fraud after consummation, was racial prejudice and social opprobrium of intermixing. Additionally, although New York had not followed many southern states in adopting the “one drop rule,” many Whites in New York agreed that any taint of colored blood removed a person from the class of white citizens. In essence, because of long-held beliefs about racial genetics and community expectations about social barriers of race in 1920s New York, knowledge of a spouse’s race was considered to be as central to marriage as the ability to consummate it.  Thus, no question was ever raised about whether Leonard’s alleged basis for annulment, racial fraud, could legitimately serve as a reason for legally declaring his marriage to Alice to be void…

Read the entire article here.