Desegregating the American Family: Interracial Kinship since Loving v. Virgina

Monday, January 16th 2022, 
6:00 c.t. - 8:00 p.m. 

Main building, Senatssaal
Regina-Pacis-Weg 3, Bonn

with 

Dr. Cedric Essi
post-doctoral scholar
Osnabrück University

While the US Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia in 1967 marks the moment when the interracial family became legitimate on paper, it was only in the 1990s that one could witness a broad paradigm shift toward cultural legitimization - commonly referred to as "multiracialism:' This lecture engages with multiracialism by demonstrating how Americans turned to autobiographical practices to assert interracial familial belonging in public. In providing an overview of this phenomenon, this lecture also explains why Barack Obama's bestseller memoir Dreams from My Father ( 1995/2004) could be retitled Dreams from My White Mother, why white mothers like memoirist Jane Lazarre described the experience of interracial kinship as "becoming black;' and why queer adaptive families are often interracial as well.