Mixed Race Studies

Palma Joy Strand: The politics of Loving v. Virginia

Omaha World-Herald
Omaha, Nebraska
2017-03-16

Palma Joy Strand, Professor of Law
Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska

Alex Brandon

The writer is a law professor and director of the 2040 Initiative at the Creighton University School of Law.

The year 2017 marks the golden anniversary of the landmark court decision Loving v. Virginia. Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Richard Loving (who happened to be white) and Mildred Jeter (who happened to be black) had a constitutional right to marry.

The right to marry someone of a different race has put down roots. In his book “Racing to Justice,” the writer and social justice advocate john a. powell notes, “Nearly 15 percent, or one in seven, of all new marriages in 2008 were between people of different races or ethnicities.”

These interracial marriages create social ripples. Powell continues, “(M)ore than a third of all adults surveyed reported having a family member whose spouse is of a different race or ethnicity — up from less than a quarter in 2005.” We have moved beyond “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” to routinely having folks of more than one race around our Thanksgiving tables.

Along with mixed-race marriages and families, the proportion of the U.S. population with multiple racial heritages has grown dramatically. The Pew Research Center found in 2013 that the share of multiracial babies had risen from 1 percent in 1970 to 10 percent in 2013.

Loving marriages and Loving families and Loving children have transformed who we are as a nation. In the midst of continued racial separation, there are racial connections — connections that disrupt the same-old, same-old stories.

Yet the relevance of Richard and Mildred Loving and Loving v. Virginia today transcends both marriage and race…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Wiley-Blackwell
June 1999
454 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-631-21021-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-631-21022-1

Edited by

Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Louis F. Mirón
University of California, Irvine

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Étienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

Table of Contents

• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments/Copyright Information
• Introduction
• Part I: Mapping The Languages of Racism
  • 1. Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations” Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres
  • 2. “I Know it’s Not Nice, But. . . ” The Changing Face of “Race” Colette Guillaumin
  • 3. The Contours of Racialization: Structures, Representations and Resistance in the United States Stephen Small
  • 4. Marxism, Racism, and Ethnicity John Solomos and Les Back
  • 5. Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities Louis F. Mirón
• Part II: Critical Multiracial Feminism
  • 6. Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
  • 7. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism Nira Yuval-Davis
  • 8. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond Patricia Hill Collins
• Part III: Fashioning Mixed Race
  • 9. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered john a. powell
  • 10. Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity Maria P. P. Root
  • 11. Cipherspace: Latino Identity Past and Present J. Jorge Klor de Alva
• Part IV: The Color(s) of Whiteness
  • 12. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness John Hartigan, Jr.
  • 13. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism Alastair Bonnett
  • 14 The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing Michael Eric Dyson
  • 15. The Trickster’s Play: Whiteness in the Subordination and Liberation Process Aida Hurtado
• Part V: Cultural Citizenship, Multiculturalism, And The State
  • 16. Citizenship Richard Delgado
  • 17. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism Renato Rosaldo
  • 18. Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States Aihwa Ong
• Part VI: Locating Class
  • 19. The Site of Class Edna Bonacich
  • 20. Between Nationality and Class Stanley Aronowitz
  • 21. Class Racism Étienne Balibar
• Part VII: Globalized Futures And Racialized Identities
  • 22. Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism Richard P. Appelbaum
  • 23. Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City Saskia Sassen
  • 24. Globalization, the Racial Divide, and a New Citizenship Michael C. Dawson
• Part VIII: Critical Engagements
  • 25. Interview with Stuart Hall: Culture and Power Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
  • 26. Angela Y. Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA Lisa Lowe
• Index

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

Indiana University Press
2012-08-16
336 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00629-5

john a. powell, Professor of Law; Director Haas Diversity Research Center
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by:

David R. Roediger, Kendrick Babcock Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Illinois

Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Moving Beyond the Isolated Self
• I. Race and Racialization
  • 1. Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?
  • 2. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered
  • 3. The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb Before Signifying as a Noun
• II. White Privilege
  • 4. Whites Will Be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege
  • 5. White Innocence and the Courts: Jurisprudential Devices that Obscure Privilege
• III. The Racialized Self
  • 6. Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation
  • 7. The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice
• IV. Engagement
  • 8. Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality
• Afterword
• References
• Index