Mixed Race Studies

What is Racial Passing?

Digital Studios: Origin of Everything
PBS Digital Studios
Public Broadcasting Service
Season 2, Episode 13 (First Aired: 2019-02-27)

Danielle Bainbridge, Host, Writer, and Postdoctoral Fellow
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

What motivates someone to disguise their race, gender, religion, etc.? Today Danielle explores the complicated history of passing in the United States.

The Value of Whiteness

The Diary of a Mad Law Professor
The Nation
2014-11-12

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia Law School, New York, New York

A lawsuit is being waged against the “wrongful birth” of a black child.

In a recent encounter between Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, the two men discussed “white privilege.” O’Reilly maintained that his accomplishments had nothing to do with race and everything to do with hard work. Stewart pointed out that O’Reilly had grown up in Levittown, New York, a planned community to which the federal and local governments transferred tremendous mortgage subsidies and other public benefits—while barring black people from living there—in the post–World War II period. O’Reilly thereby reaped the benefits of a massive, racially exclusive government wealth transfer. As legal scholar Cheryl Harris observed in a 1993 Harvard Law Review article, “the law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness”—its value dependent on the full faith and credit placed in it, ephemeral but with material consequences.

A recent lawsuit brought by Jennifer Cramblett pursues the stolen property of whiteness in unusually literal terms. Cramblett is suing an Ohio sperm bank for mistakenly inseminating her with the sperm of an African-American donor, “a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter [Payton] in an all-white community,” according to the Chicago Tribune. Cramblett is suing for breach of warranty and negligence in mishandling the vials of sperm with which she was inseminated, as well as emotional and economic loss as a result of “wrongful birth,” which deprived her of the whiteness she thought she was purchasing…

Read the entire article here.

“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again

We Are Respectable Negroes
2013-04-19

Chauncey DeVega

Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race. But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal standing, and has impacted people’s life chances across the color line.

As Cheryl Harris and Ian Haney Lopez have detailed, to be “white” is to have a type of property in America. Because “Whiteness” is property it can be inherited, passed down from one person to another as an inheritance, and has value–both symbolic and monetary–under the law, and in the broader society.

European immigrants understood (and continue to understand in the present) the value of Whiteness. In the most stark example, they knew to distance themselves from black folks as a way of become fully “white” and a “real American.”

In addition, the United States government helped to create race and reinforce the value of Whiteness when it passed immigration laws that privileged “desirable” races from Europe over those “less desirable” from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.

And of course, the racist implementation of the G.I. Bill and FHA Housing Programs after World War 2 helped to create Whiteness again by creating a segregated place called “suburbia,” and creating a stark divide in the racial wealth and income gap that is still with us today.

Race works through a type of “common sense” that is based on individual experiences, cultural norms, (misunderstandings of) history, the law, politics, as well as psychological motivations and decision-making that operate on both a conscious and subconscious level. In total, the race business is a type of magic and pseudo-science. This makes it no less real or important.

Whiteness is synonymous with “American” for those who have socialized into what sociologists such as Joe Feagin have termed “the white racial frame.” Here, common sense dictates that “those people” look “American” and those “other people” do not…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Testamentary Freedom

Southern Methodist University Law Review
Volume 62
p. 1783
2009

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Wills that prioritize the interests of nontraditional families over collateral heirs test courts’ dedication to observing the posthumous wishes of testators. Collateral heirs who object to will provisions that redraw the contours of “family” are likely to profit from the incompatibility of testamentary freedom and social deviance. Thus, the interests of married, white adults may claim priority over nonwhite, unmarried others. Wills that acknowledge the existence of moral or social transgressions—namely, interracial sex and reproduction—incite will contests by collateral heirs who leverage their status as white and legitimate in order to defeat testamentary intent.

This Article turns to antebellum and postwar will contests between disinherited white heirs and mixed-race devisees to question the role of courts in defining “family” and the expectancy of collaterals to uphold this limitation. While other studies have separately examined the myth of testamentary freedom and argued for the legitimacy of diverse families, scholars have paid less attention to the color of inheritance. Drawing on Cheryl Harris’s groundbreaking work on property and racial expectation interests, this Article illustrates the centrality of whiteness in the validation of testamentary transfers. At the same time, it questions the legal resistance to nontraditional families, which substantially weakens the aspirational theory of donative freedom—the cornerstone of Trusts & Estates. Through the intersection of wills law and family law, this Article initiates a critical inquiry of the influence of race in testamentary transfers.

Read the entire article here.