Race in a Baby’s Face

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2014-07-29 16:39Z by Steven

Race in a Baby’s Face

Psychology Today
2014-07-28

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D, Psychologist and Co-founder
Stanford University LifeWorks program for Integrative Learning

Crawling the color line

Race is supposedly something objective, even biological, that we’re ascribed at birth and marks us through our whole lives, assigning us to a group that separates us from others. But for many people race is ambiguous, complex, and uncertain. I’ve never understood my race or that of my children. And for the newest babies in my extended family, it’s not clear at all what their race is supposed to be.

When my niece had a baby, a beautiful boy, everyone oohed and aahed when they saw the cute little guy. One of his cousins glowed, “Oh he’s so cute!”  But suddenly a puzzled expression came over him and he looked at the baby’s father, then at the mother, and back at the baby and blurted out: “Wait…..they had a white baby?”…

Read the entire article here.

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Loving v. Virginia in Historical Context

Posted in Articles, History, Law, United States on 2014-07-29 00:34Z by Steven

Loving v. Virginia in Historical Context

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generatons
Brooklyn Historical Society
June 2014

Renee Romano, Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College

Renee Romano teaches history at Oberlin College and she is the author of Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Harvard University Press, 2003), and co-editor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Her new book, Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders (forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 2014) explores the contemporary prosecutions of civil rights era crimes.

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a groundbreaking decision in the aptly named case, Loving v. Virginia. Responding to a challenge to a Virginia law that barred interracial marriages, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws that made it illegal for whites and nonwhites to marry were unconstitutional.

There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection clause,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the unanimous decision.

With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court overturned centuries of common practice and its own legal precedent.

The colony of Virginia had enacted the first law punishing interracial marriage in 1691 in an attempt to prevent what it called the “abominable mixture and spurious issue” produced by unions between whites and nonwhites. Miscegenation laws proved vital for establishing racial boundaries and for constructing a racial hierarchy that placed whites above people of color. All but nine of the fifty states outlawed interracial marriage at some time in their history. These laws were not limited to the South—they existed at different historical moments in states ranging from Massachusetts to California, and they variously outlawed marriages between whites and those defined as black, Asian and American Indian. What they had in common was a shared intent in protecting the status of whites and communicating the subordinate position of nonwhite groups…

Read the entire article here.

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