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A Room With Many Views: A Response To Essays On According To Our Hearts: Rhinelander V. Rhinelander And The Multiracial Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Jul 2013

A Room With Many Views: A Response To Essays On According To Our Hearts: Rhinelander V. Rhinelander And The Multiracial Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

At the outset, l should note that I am very grateful to all contributors in this issue-Professors Kerry Abrams, Jacquelyn Bridgeman, Jennifer Chacon, Robin Lenhardt, and Laura Rosenbury for their insightful, powerful, and stirring reactions to my book According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, and to Professor Melissa Murray for her elegant Foreword to this issue. Reading the responses of these scholars whom I admire and respect has been exhilarating and affirming. Indeed, seeing the many ways in which just a small group of these reviewers have examined, interpreted, and even "felt" …


What Would Be The Story Of Alice And Leonard Rhinelander Today?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Apr 2013

What Would Be The Story Of Alice And Leonard Rhinelander Today?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

On November 8, 2011, I presented this lecture as part of the annual Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Family Law Lecture Series at the University of California, Davis School of Law. I extend sincere thanks to the Bodenheimer family for endowing this special lecture. I feel honored to be a small part of this wonderful lecture series in family law. I feel particularly grateful because the University of California, Davis School of Law was my "birthplace" as a professor. Dean Rex Perschbacher, then Associate Dean Kevin Johnson, and the law school faculty welcomed me into academia by giving me my first job …


A House Divided: The Invisibility Of The Multiracial Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi Jan 2009

A House Divided: The Invisibility Of The Multiracial Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is an invited special projects paper for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. It examines how society and law work together to frame the normative ideal of intimate couples and families as both heterosexual and monoracial. This Article sets out to accomplish three goals. First, it examines the daily social privileges of monoracial, heterosexual couples as a means of revealing the invisibility of interracial marriages and families within our society. Specifically, Part II of this Article uses the work of Professor Peggy McIntosh to identify unacknowledged monoracial, heterosexual-couple privileges and list unearned privileges, both social and legal, …


A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander V. Rhinelander As A Formative Lesson On Race, Identity, Marriage, And Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Dec 2007

A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander V. Rhinelander As A Formative Lesson On Race, Identity, Marriage, And Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the past and present social meanings of what occurred during a 1920s New York trial court case, Rhinelander v. Rhinelander. Rhinelander involved a claim by Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a white socialite, who filed for annulment of his marriage to Alice Beatrice Jones, a woman of racially ambiguous heritage. Leonard claimed that Alice committed fraud that went to the essence of their marriage by failing to inform him that she was of "colored" blood. According to legend, Leonard and Alice were madly in love, and Leonard filed the lawsuit only because of his father, who refused to accept …


There’S Just One Hitch, Will Smith: Examining Title Vii, Race, Casting, And Discrimination On The Fortieth Anniversary Of Loving V. Virginia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Jan 2007

There’S Just One Hitch, Will Smith: Examining Title Vii, Race, Casting, And Discrimination On The Fortieth Anniversary Of Loving V. Virginia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

In this Symposium Essay, I use Loving v. Virginia as a backdrop for exploring why our society allows, without legal challenge, customer preference or discrimination to unduly influence casting decisions for actors paired in romantic couples in movies and television. In so doing, I examine how existing anti-discrimination law in employment can and should be used to address these improper influences within the entertainment industry. In Part I of the Essay, I first survey the growing practice of casting intraminority couples casting in films and television and examine how such casting, despite its appeal on the surface, may work to …


Undercover Other, Angela Onwuachi-Willig May 2006

Undercover Other, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay argues in favor of legally recognizing same-sex marriages by exploring the similarities in passing between members of same-sex marriages/relationships and interracial marriages/relationships. Specifically, this Essay unpacks the claim that the ability of gays and lesbians to pass as heterosexual distinguishes the ban on same-sex marriages from former bans on interracial marriages. Part I of this Essay first describes policy-based critiques of a Loving-based argument for legalizing same-sex marriage, or as one scholar has coined, of playing the Loving card by analogizing the racism that motivated anti-miscegenation statues that the Supreme Court struck down in 1967 to the anti-gay …


The Return Of The Ring: Welfare Reform’S Marriage Cure As The Revival Of Post-Bellum Control, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Dec 2005

The Return Of The Ring: Welfare Reform’S Marriage Cure As The Revival Of Post-Bellum Control, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

In 1996, the United States Congress began its imposition of a marital solution to poverty when it enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ("PRWORA"). Nearly ten years later, Congress has strengthened its commitment to marriage as a cure for welfare dependency with proposals such as the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2005. If passed, this bill would provide 1.5 billion dollars for pro-marriage programs and require each state to explain how its welfare program will encourage marriage for single mothers who receive public aid. With these proposals, Congress has continued to construct poverty as …