Law and Race Commons^™

Equal Work, Stephanie Bornstein

Maryland Law Review

Most Americans have heard of the gender pay gap and the statistic that, today, women earn on average eighty cents to every dollar men earn. Far less discussed, there is an even greater racial pay gap. Black and Latino men average only seventy-one cents to the dollar of white men. Compounding these gaps is the “polluting” impact of status characteristics on pay: as women and racial minorities enter occupations formerly dominated by white men, the pay for those occupations goes down. Improvement in the gender pay gap has been stalled for nearly two decades; the racial pay gap is actually …

A Tribute To Hope Lewis, Karen E. Bravo

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Victims Of The School-To-Prison Pipeline: Understanding Black Girls, School Push-Out, And The Impact Of The Every Student Succeeds Act, Bianca A. White

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Pena-Rodriguez V. Colorado: Elevating A Constitutional Exception Above The Tanner Framework, Caroline Covington

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Exceptional Negro: Racism, White Privilege And The Lie Of Respectability Politics, Traci Ellis

Publications & Research

Overwhelmingly, black folks have close encounters on a regular basis with being marginalized, insulted, dismissed and discriminated against. It is the natural consequence of still being considered little more than a Negro in this country. Especially for the “Exceptional Negroes.” But, as we will see, the truth is that even with our exceptionalism, we are still just “Negroes” to white America and in case we forget that, they will swiftly remind us.

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, …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Suing For Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, And Legal Activism In The 1970s, Ariel Arnau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how the legal activism of a Puerto Rican group of activist-lawyers and community members contributed to the reshaping of voting law and language policy during the 1970s. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) coordinated a series of lawsuits in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia during the early 1970s. The decisions in these lawsuits provided the legal framework to rewrite federal voting rights law during the Voting Rights Act (VRA) reauthorization hearings in 1975. These cases resulted in vastly expanded opportunity to vote for all language minorities in the United States. These civil rights …

The Early History Of The Black Lives Matter Movement, And The Implications Thereof, Garrett Chase

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Dead Canaries In The Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited, Jeannine Bell

Georgia State University Law Review

The well-publicized deaths of several African-Americans—Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among others—at the hands of police stem from tragic interactions predicated upon well-understood practices analyzed by police scholars since the 1950s. The symbolic assailant, a construct created by police scholar Jerome Skolnick in the mid-1960s to identify persons whose behavior and characteristics the police view as threatening, is especially relevant to contemporary policing. This Article explores the societal roots of the creation of a Black symbolic assailant in contemporary American policing.

The construction of African-American men as symbolic assailants is one of the most important factors characterizing police …

Prisoner's Dilemma—Exhausted Without A Place Of Rest(Itution): Why The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Exhaustion Requirement Needs To Be Amended, Ryan Lefkowitz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) passed in 1996 in an effort to curb litigation from prisoners. The exhaustion requirement of the PLRA requires prisoners to fully exhaust any administrative remedies available to them before filing a lawsuit concerning any aspect of prison life. If a prisoner fails to do so, the lawsuit is subject to dismissal. The exhaustion requirement applies to all types of prisoner lawsuits, from claims filed for general prison conditions to excessive force and civil rights violations. It has been consistently and aggressively applied by the courts, blocking prisoners’ lawsuits from ever going to trial. Attempts …

Trapped In The Shackles Of America's Criminal Justice System, Shristi Devu

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

Race, Speech, And Sports, Matthew J. Parlow

University of Richmond Law Review

Race, sports, and free speech rights intersected in a very controversial and public way during the 2016 and 2017 National Football League (“NFL”) seasons. On August 26, 2016, Colin Kaepernick spurred a national debate when he refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem before the NFL preseason game between the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers, Kaepernick’s team at the time.

Entering The Trump Ice Age: Contextualizing The New Immigration Enforcement Regime, Bill Ong Hing

Texas A&M Law Review

During the early stages of the Trump ICE age, America seemed to be witnessing and experiencing an unparalleled era of immigration enforcement. But is it unparalleled? Did we not label Barack Obama the “deporter-inchief?” Was it not George W. Bush who used the authority of the Patriot Act to round up nonimmigrants from Muslim and Arab countries, and did his ICE not commonly engage in armed raids at factories and other worksites? Are there not strong parallels that can be drawn between Trump enforcement plans and actions and those of other eras? What about the fear and hysteria that seems …

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 …