Law Commons^™

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 …

Regulating White Desire, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article contends that segregationist justifications for miscegenation and segregation laws shows that those laws effectively imposed a legal duty on whites to adhere to cultural norms of endogamy. Dominant social groups enforce rules of endogamy⁠—the cultural practice of encouraging people to marry within their own social group⁠—to protect the dominant status of their individual members and of the social group in general. Thus, laws prohibiting interracial marriages regulated white desire in order to protect the dominant status of whites as a group. The Loving Court, therefore, ultimately was correct in declaring that miscegenation laws denied blacks equal protection.

Part …