Law and Race Commons^™

“Indian” As A Political Classification: Reading The Tribe Back Into The Indian Child Welfare Act, Allison Krause Elder

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In the summer of 2018, the Ninth Circuit will consider an appeal from the dismissal of a constitutional challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Brought by a conservative think-tank, this case frames the ICWA as race-based legislation, violating equal protection by depriving Indian children of the same procedures as non-Indian children in child custody cases. In reality, the ICWA seeks to protect the interests of tribes, Indian families, and Indian children by establishing special procedures and obligations in Indian child custody cases. On its face, the ICWA is concerned not with the race of children, but with the …

Enemy And Ally: Religion In Loving V. Virginia And Beyond, Leora F. Eisenstadt

Fordham Law Review

Throughout the Loving case, religion appeared both overtly and subtly to endorse or lend credibility to the arguments against racial mixing. This use of religion is unsurprising given that supporters of slavery, white supremacy, and segregation have, for decades, turned to religion to justify their ideologies. Although these views are no longer mainstream, they have recently appeared again in arguments against same-sex marriage and gay and transgender rights generally. What is remarkable in the Loving case, however, is an alternate use of religion, not to justify white supremacy and segregation but instead to highlight the irrationality of its supporters’ claims. …

Fear Of A Multiracial Planet: Loving’S Children And The Genocide Of The White Race, Reginald Oh

Fordham Law Review

Part I analyzes the Loving decision striking down antimiscegenation laws and examines the segregationists’ justifications for antimiscegenation laws. Next, Part II explores the historical opposition of white segregationists to interracial marriages, families, and children and argues that the principle and practice of endogamy is a central feature of Jim Crow segregation. Finally, Part III examines the present ideology of white nationalism and shows that white nationalists oppose interracial unions and families for some of the same reasons that white segregationists opposed them. Specifically, white nationalists oppose interracial families because they are one of the main factors contributing to the so-called …

Multiracial Malaise: Multiracial As A Legal Racial Category, Taunya Lovell Banks

Fordham Law Review

The focus of this Article is the underlying assumption of the Brookings Institution report that multiracial individuals constitute a separate racial category. My discussion of legal racial categories focuses only ongovernment “racial” definitions. Multiracial individuals should enjoy thefreedom to self-identify as they wish—and, like others, be afforded theprotections of antidiscrimination law.The question is whether a separate legal racial category is needed to provide that protection. Race in this country has been “crafted from the point of view of [white] race protection” protecting the interests of white Americans from usurpation by non whites and, unless the creation of a separate multiracial …

Fear Of A Multiracial Planet: Loving'S Children And The Genocide Of The White Race, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that prohibitions against interracial marriages were unconstitutional, strong cultural opposition to interracial couples, marriages, and families continues to exist. Illustrative of this opposition is the controversy over an Old Navy clothing store advertisement posted on Twitter in spring 2016. The advertisement depicted an African American woman and a white man together with a presumably mixed-race child. The white man is carrying the boy on his back. It is a clear depiction of an interracial family. Although seemingly innocuous, this advertisement sparked a flood of comments expressing open hostility …

Loving’S Legacy: Decriminalization And The Regulation Of Sex And Sexuality, Melissa Murray

Fordham Law Review

2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated bans on miscegenation and interracial marriages. In the years since Loving was decided, it remains a subject of intense scholarly debate and attention. The conventional wisdom suggests that the Court’s decision in Loving was hugely transformative— decriminalizing interracial marriages and relationships and removing the most pernicious legal barriers to such couplings. But other developments suggest otherwise. If we shift our lens from marriages to other areas of the law—child custody cases, for example—Loving’s legacy seems less rosy. In the years preceding and following Loving, …

More Than Love: Eugenics And The Future Of Loving V. Virginia, Osagie K. Obasogie

Fordham Law Review

This Symposium is dedicated to celebrating how Loving v. Virginia paved the way for greater acceptance of multiracial families and interracial intimacy. Loving is largely understood as a case that rejected the bigotry and hatred experienced by interracial couples and affirmed the idea that law supports love across racial lines. With this narrative comes the popular understanding that Loving stands for the notion that love conquers all. This idea has shaped other legal strategies and social movements, such as the effort to have same-sex marriage legally recognized. Thus, Loving is thought of as drawing attention to the importance of romantic …

Race And Assisted Reproduction: Implications For Population Health, Aziza Ahmed

Fordham Law Review

This Article emerges from Fordham Law Review’s Symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the case that found antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. Inspired by the need to interrogate the regulation of race in the context of family, this Article examines the diffuse regulatory environment around assisted reproductive technology (ART) that shapes procreative decisions and the inequalities that these decisions may engender. ART both centers biology and raises questions about how we imagine our racial futures in the context of family, community, and nation. Importantly, ART demonstrates how both the state and private actors shape family formation along racial lines. …

Evolution Of The Racial Identity Of Children Of Loving: Has Our Thinking About Race And Racial Issues Become Obsolete?, Kevin Brown

Fordham Law Review

I served on the panel entitled “The Children of Loving,” which for me has two connotations. First, as an African American who married a white woman twenty years after the decision, I am a child of Loving in the sense that I was in an interracial marriage. But as a father of two black-white biracial children, I am also a father of two Lovingchildren. In this Article, I focus on the latter connotation of the “Children of Loving.” In particular, I discuss the evolution of my children’s racial identities. Due to my personal connections, I can share both an academic …

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

Fordham Law Review

This Essay reconsiders or reaffirms the Lovings’ status as civil rights icons by drawing on source material provided by the documentary The Loving Story. This nonfiction treatment of the couple and their lawsuit reveals their complexity as individuals and as a couple, the social relationships that made them desperate to live together and raise their children in Virginia, and the oppression they suffered at the hands of state actors motivated by a virulent white supremacy to make the Lovings’ desire to make a home for themselves in the state impossible. Part I briefly describes the Lovings’ struggle against Virginia’s Racial …

Lgbt Equality And Sexual Racism, Russell K. Robinson, David M. Frost

Fordham Law Review

Bigots such as the trial judge in Loving have long invoked religion to justify discrimination. We agree with other scholars that neither religion nor artistic freedom justifies letting businesses discriminate. However, we also want to make manifest the tension between the public posture of LGBT-rights litigants and the practices of some LGBT people who discriminate based on race in selecting partners. We argue that some white people’s aversion to dating and forming relationships with people of color is a form of racism, and this sexual racism is inconsistent with the spirit of Loving. Part I provides a review of empirical …

The Hope Of Loving And Warping Racial Progress Narratives, Jasmine Mitchell

Fordham Law Review

Loving v. Virginia has been heralded as the catalyst for a “biracial baby boom.” Loving marked the end of the criminalization of miscegenation between nonwhite and white individuals and the automatic illegitimacy of mixed-race children in many states, and it heralded the beginning of the celebration of interracial families as part of a new multiracial, and eventual postracial, era. The construction of whiteness has been tied to the management of interracial sex and marriage, and Loving razed antimiscegenation laws that, in former Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words, had been “designed to maintain White Supremacy.” Today, the media relies on demographic …

The School To Deportation Pipeline, Laila L. Hlass

Georgia State University Law Review

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes.

Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in …

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

Champions For Justice 2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

When A Wrongful Birth Claim May Not Be Wrong: Race, Inequality, And The Cost Of Blackness, Kimani Paul-Emile

Fordham Law Review

The year 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision, in which a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Today, when we consider interracial loving, we tend to envision romantic relationships. What is often overlooked, however, is the relationship between parent and child: among the most intimate of relationships. A primary reason for this oversight may be that we do not often conceptualize the parent and child relationship as an interracial space. Indeed, although most people select their romantic partners, few are afforded the opportunity to select their children outside of …

Undocumented Citizens Of The United States: The Repercussions Of Denying Birth Certificates, Anna L. Lichtenberger

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Foreword, Robin A. Lenhardt, Tanya K. Hernandez, Kimani Paul-Emile

Fordham Law Review

This Foreword provides an overview of Fifty Years of Loving v. Virginia and the Continued Pursuit of Racial Equality, a symposium hosted by the Fordham Law Review and cosponsored by the Fordham Law School Center on Race, Law & Justice. Even fifty years later, Loving provides ample foundation for an inquiry into the operation of race and racial inequality in the United States, which touches on the queries outlined above, as well as many others. In our view, a symposium focused on Loving makes a significant contribution by deepening scholarly analysis of that decision and by explicating the kinds of …

The Changing Tides Of Adoption: Why Marriage, Race, And Family Identity Still Matter, Jessica Dixon Weaver

SMU Law Review

This essay expounds on the shifting motivation for adoption in the United States using a critical race feminist theory lens to explore how adoption remains wedded to marriage, the control of wealth, and family identity. These three elements have been historically and legally tied to race in that the law was intentionally written to exclude certain persons of color from being able to access marriage or wealth, thereby diminishing their ability to establish family identity.

This essay proceeds in three parts. Part II sets forth an overview of the evolution of adoption by exploring the breakdown of formal adoption and …

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …