Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance

The University of Chicago Press
2001
232 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780226536637

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

As late as the 1960s, states could legally punish minorities who either had sex with or married persons outside of their racial groups. In this first comprehensive study of the legal regulation of interracial relationships, Rachel Moran grapples with the consequences of that history, candidly confronting its profound effects on not only conceptions of race and identity, but on ideas about sex, marriage, and family.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Insights from Interracial Intimacy
• 2. Antimiscegenation Laws and the Enforcement of Racial Boundaries
• 3. Subverting Racial Boundaries: Identity, Ambiguity, and Interracial Intimacy
• 4. Antimiscegenation Laws and Norms of Sexual and Marital Propriety
• 5. Judicial Review of Antimiscegenation Laws: The Long Road to Loving
• 6. Race and Romanticism: The Persistence of Racial Endogamy after Loving
• 7. Race and the Family: The Best Interest of the Child in Interracial Custody and Adoption Disputes
• 8. Race and Identity: The New Multiracialism
• 9. The Lessons of Interracial Intimacy
• Notes
• Index

Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change

Berkeley Women’s Law Journal
University of California, Berkeley Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series
2002
pp. 153-164

Stephanie M. Wildman, Professor of Law and Director of Center for Social Justice and Public Service
Santa Clara University School of Law

Moran, Rachel F.  (2001).  Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
271 pp.

In her review essay Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change, Stephanie Wildman examines Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance by Rachel F. Moran. Moran’s book investigates the so-called private landscape of race in the context of interracial intimacy. Moran urges the connection between our personal, private views of race and racial issues and the policy decisions society makes in the public realm. Moran explores historic antimiscegenation laws and their role in establishing societal norms and customs, the significance of race in daily life, the legal decisions leading to Loving v. Virginia, and the role of race in custody and adoption decisions. Wildman observes that interracial gay and lesbian relationships represent another area usually viewed as private, yet which implicates the societal landscape. Recognition of the public aspect of personal choice is a necessary element in the fight against bias and the movement toward social change.

Read the entire review/essay here.

Race Law Stories

Foundation Press
2008
624 pages
ISBN-13: 9781599410012

Edited by

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Devon Wayne Carbado, Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Race Law Stories brings to life well-known and not-so-well known legal opinions—hidden gems—that address slavery, Native American conquest, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, Japanese American internment, immigration, affirmative action, voting rights and employment discrimination. Each story goes beyond legal opinions to explore the historical context of the cases and the worlds of the ordinary people and larger-than-life personalities who drove the litigation process. The book’s multiracial and interdisciplinary approach makes it useful for courses on race and the law and Critical Race Theory both inside and outside the law school as well as for undergraduate and graduate courses in ethnic studies. Each story illuminates the role that the law has played in both creating and combating racial inequality. Race Law Cases, an edited collection of the cases discussed in the Race Law Stories, will be available as a supplement in 2008.

View the Table of Contents here.
Read the introduction here.

Kip And Alice Rhinelander Social Error

New York Daily News
1999-05-02 07:10Z

Jay Maeder, Daily News Staff Writer

From Germany to the New World came the Rhinelanders in the year 1696, and here they settled New Rochelle and begat. They were quite meticulous about it. For 200 years, naught but the proudest blood streamed through the veins of old Philip Jacob Rhinelander’s descendants as they amassed a real estate fortune second only to that of the Astors and assumed positions of importance at the most rarefied levels of New York and Newport society.

There was a bit of clucking late in the 19th century when young Philip R. Rhinelander married a Kip. Still, the Kips were only slightly less distinguished. It was not as if young Rhinelander had married, for example, a Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilts were nothing but Staten Island farmers.

In the year 1924, the last of the line was Philip’s son, 21-year-old Leonard Kip Rhinelander, and he was something of a disappointment, a graceless and awkward lad who was in and out of sanitariums for treatment of assorted nervousnesses and who was regarded as perhaps a little feeble. For all that, he still belonged to the Sons of the Revolution and the Society of Colonial Wars and the Society of the War of 1812 and the Riding Club and the Badminton Club, and he was heir to $100 million, and accordingly he was one of high society’s most eligible bachelors, fluttered at by the fairest of debutante flowers and even by a few hopeful widows. He was, after all, a Rhinelander.

But Kip’s heart belonged to pretty Alice Jones, a nursemaid and laundress, daughter of a New Rochelle busman, and on Oct. 14, 1924, he married his Cinderella in a civil ceremony so quiet that word did not get out into New York and Newport for several more weeks. Whereupon there erupted high society’s most shocking public scandal in generations.

For the bride’s father, English-born George Jones, was the son of a West Indian, and thus did West Indian blood stream through his own veins as well, and thus, too, did it stream through his daughter’s.

Or, to put it another way, Alice Jones was a colored girl…

Read the entire article here.