In an op-ed in New York Daily News, Professor Tanya K. Hernández examines the discrimination children of interracial marriage face fifty-four years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia.
Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated interracial marriage bans in the United States in 1967. Interracial marriage has been legal across the nation for nearly half a century, but the children of mixed-race marriages and other interracial unions are still subject to many other types of discrimination that their parents and ancestors faced. The persistence of such bias shows that while courts have may have remedied the bias behind interracial marriage bans, but they remain unable to blunt the continued vibrancy of white supremacy in the United States.
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Mixed-race identity does not alter the influence of racialized stereotypes and implicit bias regarding the inherent criminality of those viewed as non-white. Yet like so many other anti-discrimination law contexts examined in my book (employment, housing, public accommodations and education), the criminal justice system operates in a seemingly white/non-white binary that entangles people not based upon their mixed-race personal identity, but instead based on a knowledge of or a viewing of their non-white appearance.