Mixed Race Studies

Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
June 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the “loving” of America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

Table of Contents

• Introduction Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor
• Part I: Explaining Loving v. Virginia
  • 1. The legacy of Loving John DeWitt Gregory and Joanna L. Grossman
• Part II: Historical Antecedents to Loving
  • 2. The ‘love’ of Loving Jason A. Gillmer
  • 3. Loving in Indian territory: tribal miscegenation law in historical perspective Carla Pratt
  • 4. American mestizo: Filipinos and antimiscegenation laws in California Leti Volpp
  • 5. Perez v. Sharp and the limits of Loving: race, marriage, and citizenship reconsidered R. A. Lenhardt
• Part III: Loving and Interracial Relationships: Contemporary Challenges
  • 6. The road to Loving: the legacy of antimiscegenation law Kevin Noble Maillard
  • 7. Love at the margins: the racialization of sex and the sexualization of race Camille A. Nelson
  • 8. The crime of Loving: Loving, Lawrence, and beyond I. Bennett Capers
  • 9. What’s Loving got to do with it? Law shaping experience and experience shaping law Renée M. Landers
  • 10. Fear of a ‘Brown’ planet or a new hybrid culture? Jacquelyn Bridgeman
• Part IV: Considering the Limits of Loving
  • 11. Black pluralism in post-Loving America Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 12. Multiracialism and reparations: accounting for political blackness Angelique Davis
  • 13. Finding a Loving home Angela Onwuachi-Willig and Jacob Willig-Onwuachi
• Part V: Loving outside the United States Borders
  • 14. Racially inadmissible wives Rose Cuison Villazor
  • 15. Flying buttresses Nancy K. Ota
  • 16. Crossing borders: Loving v. Virginia as a story of migration Victor Romero
• Part VI: Loving and Beyond: Marriage, Intimacy and Diverse Relationships
  • 17. Black vs. gay: centering LBGT people of color in civil marriage debates Adele Morrison
  • 18. Forty years after Loving: a legacy of unintended consequences Rachel F. Moran
  • 19. The end of marriage Tucker Culbertson
  • 20. Afterword Peter Wallenstein

American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 33, Number 44 (2000)
pages 795-835

Leti Volpp, Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

This essay interprets the legal history of efforts to prohibit intermarriage between Filipino men and white women in the state of California in the 1920s and 30s. I do this through examining both public discourse and legal discourse, in the form of advisory opinions of the California State Attorney General and the Los Angeles County Counsel, litigation in Los Angles Superior Court and the California Court of Appeals, and state legislation.

Much scholarship examines antimiscegenation laws through the lens of presumptive heterosexuality, and gives enormous explanatory power to race in a way that ignores the role of class and gender. This paper argues that we need to examine the mutually constitutive nature of these forces in shaping antimiscegenation laws. Thus, I examine how the racial identity of Filipinos was shaped by assumptions about racialized sexuality, colonial relations between the United States and the Philippines, the importation of exploitable laborers without political rights, and the intertwining of gender and nationalism.

The question of whether Filipinos should be prohibited from marrying white women reached the California Court of Appeals in 1933 in the guise of the query as to whether Filipinos should be considered “Mongolian.” The state in 1880 and 1905 had prohibited the licensing of marriages between “Mongolians” and “white persons” and invalidated all such marriages. Subsequent legal challenges involving the right of Filipinos to marry whites betray enormous confusion as to whether Filipinos should be classified as “Mongolian,” or as a separate ethnological group, as “Malay.” This racial classification was put at issue in cases where Filipino/white couples sought to marry, and who therefore asserted that Filipinos were not “Mongolians”; in a case where a mother sought to stop her daughter’s marriage; in two cases where annulment of marriage was sought, one by a white woman, the other by a Filipino man; and in one case in which a prosecutor sought to void a marriage so a white wife could testify against her Filipino husband.

The positioning of Filipinos as “Mongolian,” or in opposition to “Mongolians” as the ethnologically different “Malay,” provides a narrative within which the contemporary identity of Filipinos is created. This history demonstrates that there is nothing natural or preordained about racial classification, and provides an example of how race is made.

Read the entire article here.