Migration and Loving

This paper explores the relationship between anti-miscegenation laws, interracial marriage and black males' geographical distribution in the U.S. during and after the Great Migration. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which forced the last 16 Southern states to strike down their anti-miscegenation laws, creates a unique opportunity to explore the impact of an exogenous change in a state's laws regulating interracial marriages. Analyzing the U.S. Census data, I find that anti-miscegenation laws in an individual's state of birth affect the sorting of inter- and intraracially married black males into destination states differentially.interracial marriage, migration, anti-miscegenation laws

Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States

Still another thesis on Rubik’s cube? Is there still something new to write on that puzzle? In this document, we approach the cube with a rather unusual question: “how would you solve the cube if, instead of using the 6 classical rotations, you were restricted to a set of arbitrary moves?” To answer that question, we will dive into group theory. Inspired by some previous work on the factorization of the symmetric group, we have developed an algorithm that answers our initial question. However, being able to solve the cube with any set of moves has a trade-off: while some algorithms solve the cube in 20 moves, ours requires several thousands. One could go further than this thesis by: improving our algorithm, providing rigourous bounds on its complexity, or generalizing the algorithm to the n × n × n cube.

Crossing the race divide : interracial sex in antebellum Savannah

This article explores the social significance of inter-racial sexual contact in an antebellum Southern city. How did inter-racial sex challenge the established social hierarchy in Savannah? Was it a controversial issue, viewed as a threat to the social order, or was it accepted as an inevitable evil resulting from a mixed population residing in close proximity

American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination

This paper offers and initial examination of representations of Asian American mixed race during the long period of Asian exclusion and enforced anti-miscegenation when racial mixing was legally proscribed. I argue that this literature must be understood through two categories Orientalist texts that produce and reproduce dominant discourses about Asian American mixed race and cosmopolitan texts written by mixed-race figures circling in vanguard cliques of art and literature. After tracking the representations of early Asian American mixed race in U.S. literature, this paper offers an analysis of the writing of Asian American mixed-race authors themselves in order to expand and push current theorizations

Loving’s Legacy: Decriminalization and the Regulation of Sex and Sexuality

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, white women routinely lost custody of their white children when they remarried or began dating black men. That this should happen in the years before Loving is perhaps unsurprising. But one might expect a shift after Loving, when interracial marriages and dating were decriminalized and made lawful. This was not the case. Even after Loving, white women routinely lost custody when they remarried or dated black men. These underexplored child-custody cases illuminate an important aspect of Loving—and indeed, any civil rights effort that is predicated on decriminalization. Despite the turn toward decriminalization and subsequent legalization, the impulse to punish and stigmatize certain conduct does not dissipate entirely. Instead, it may simply be rerouted into other legal avenues where disapprobation of the challenged conduct may continue to be expressed and felt. Recognizing and understanding this “regulatory displacement” phenomenon is critical as we assess the progress of other decriminalization efforts, including the recent struggle to legalize same-sex marriages

The Making of a Eurasian: Writing, Miscegenation, and Redemption in Sui Sin Far

This paper examines the literary itinerary of Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton with a specific focus on the shaping of her Eurasian authorship

Introduction: Identity and Difference

1999-01-01

Hollywood Loving

In this Essay, I highlight how nongovernmental entities establish political, moral, and sexual standards through visual media, which powerfully underscores and expresses human behavior. Through the Motion Picture Production Code (the “Hays Code”) and the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (the “TV Code”), Americans viewed entertainment as a pre-mediated, engineered world that existed outside of claims of censorship and propaganda. This Essay critically examines the role of film and television as persuasive and integral legal actors and it considers how these sectors operate to maintain, and sometimes challenge, racial order

A Shplit Ticket, Half Irish, Half Chinay : Representations of Mixed-Race and Hybridity in the Turn-of-the-Century Theater

Charles Townsend\u27s 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison\u27s stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O\u27Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is key to this capital farce, and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert\u27s spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O\u27Wang, the main character\u27s background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring

Teaching Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far: Multiple Approaches

This essay compares pedagogical approaches to teaching the literature of Edith Eaton in two distinct contexts: a course on Asian American Literature and a course on Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage. This is a comparison of the variant pedagogical approaches in these two different contexts