The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying, and has over 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget of over $300 million. Affiliates of the ACLU are active in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties to be at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
Civil liberties are guarantees and freedoms that governments commit not to abridge, either by constitution, legislation, or judicial interpretation, without due process. Though the scope of the term differs between countries, civil liberties may include the freedom of conscience, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to security and liberty, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the right to equal treatment under the law and due process, the right to a fair trial, and the right to life. Other civil liberties include the right to own property, the right to defend oneself, and the right to bodily integrity. Within the distinctions between civil liberties and other types of liberty, distinctions exist between positive liberty/positive rights and negative liberty/negative rights.
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is an independent nonprofit research center in Washington, D.C. EPIC's mission is to focus public attention on emerging privacy and related human rights issues. EPIC works to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values, and to promote the Public Voice in decisions concerning the future of the Internet.
Multiracial people are people of more than one race or ethnicity. A variety of terms have been used for multi-racial people, including mixed-race, biracial, multiethnic, polyethnic, occasionally bi-ethnic, Métis, Creole, Muwallad, mulatto, Colored, Dougla, half-caste, mestizo, Melungeon, quadroon, octoroon, sambo/zambo, Eurasian, hapa, hāfu, Garifuna, pardo and Guran.
Civil liberties in the United States are certain unalienable rights retained by citizens of the United States under the Constitution of the United States, as interpreted and clarified by the Supreme Court of the United States and lower federal courts. Civil liberties are simply defined as individual legal and constitutional protections from entities more powerful than an individual, for example, parts of the government, other individuals, or corporations. The explicitly defined liberties make up the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the right to privacy. There are also many liberties of people not defined in the Constitution, as stated in the Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional, including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.
Wardell Anthony "Ward" Connerly is an American political and anti-affirmative action activist, businessman, and former University of California Regent (1993–2005). He is also the founder and the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a national non-profit organization in opposition to racial and gender preferences, and is the president of Californians for Equal Rights, a non-profit organization active in the state of California with a similar mission. He is considered to be the man behind California's Proposition 209 prohibiting race- and gender-based preferences in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions, a program known as affirmative action.
Privacy International (PI) is a UK-based registered charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world. First formed in 1990, registered as a non-profit company in 2002 and as a charity in 2012, PI is based in London. Its current executive director, since 2012, is Dr Gus Hosein.
Multiracialism is a conceptual framework used to theorize and interpret identity formation in global multiracial populations. Multiracialism explores the tendency for multiracial individuals to identify with a third category of 'mixed-ness' as opposed to being a fully accepted member of multiple, or any, racial group(s). As an analytical tool, multiracialism strives to emphasize that societies are increasingly composed of multiracial individuals, warranting a broader recognition of those who do not fit into a society's clear-cut notions of race. Additionally, multiracialism also focuses on what identity formation means in the context of oppressive histories and cultural erasure.
The Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA) is an international collaboration of community organizations. With dedication to advocacy and education on behalf of the mixed-race community, AMEA works to promote a community of acceptance and equality.
Marjorie Heins (b.1946) is a First Amendment lawyer, writer and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project.
David A. Keene is an American political consultant, former presidential advisor, and newspaper editor, formerly the Opinion Editor of The Washington Times. Keene was the president of the National Rifle Association for the traditional two one-year terms from 2011 to 2013. From 1984 to 2011, he was the chairman of the American Conservative Union.
France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist. and documentary filmmaker. Twine's research has made significant contributions to interdisciplinary research in gender and sexuality studies, racism/anti-racism, feminist studies, science and technology studies, British cultural studies, and qualitative research methods. She has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism and has published 11 books and more than 80 articles, review essays, and books on these topics. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Career Award by the Race, Class, and Gender section of the American Sociological Association for her intellectual, innovative and creative contributions to sociology. Twine is the first sociologist to publish an ethnography on everyday racism in rural Brazil after the end of military dictatorship during the "abertura". Her most recent book, Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley will be published in 2022.
Multiracial Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially. In the 2010 United States census, approximately 9 million individuals or 3.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial. There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number. Historical reasons, including slavery creating a racial caste and the European-American suppression of Native Americans, often led people to identify or be classified by only one ethnicity, generally that of the culture in which they were raised. Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their multiracial heritage because of racial discrimination against minorities. While many Americans may be considered multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify so culturally, any more than they maintain all the differing traditions of a variety of national ancestries.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civil rights organization in Newark, New Jersey, and an affiliate of the national American Civil Liberties Union. According to the ACLU-NJ's stated mission, the ACLU-NJ operates through litigation on behalf of individuals, lobbying in state and local legislatures, and community education.
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were laws passed by most states that prohibited interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibited interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Most states had repealed such laws by 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in the remaining 16 states. The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.
Mathew H. Ahmann was an American Catholic layman and civil rights activist. He was a leader of the Catholic Church's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1960 founded and became the executive director of the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice.
Biracial and multiracial identity development is described as a process across the life span that is based on internal and external forces such as individual family structure, cultural knowledge, physical appearance, geographic location, peer culture, opportunities for exploration, socio-historical context, etc.
Multiracial feminist theory is a feminist theory, thought to have gained momentum in the 1970s, promoted by feminist women of color, including Black, Chicanx, Asian, Native women, as well as anti-racist white women. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism” in 1996, a piece emphasising intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis in feminist discourse.
Feminism and racism are highly intertwined concepts in intersectional theory, focusing on women in the Western World, who experience both sexism and racism. Within the Western feminist movement, which seeks to end gender oppression, non-white women have experienced racism. Similarly, these women have also experienced sexism within various antiracism and civil rights movements. In America, the racism and sexism prevalent has affected female activists of African, Mexican, Native American and various Asian descent in different ways, highlighting the need for a political movement that is aware of the intersection of race and gender oppression. These experiences of racism and sexism have prevented women of color from fully partaking in such movements, but they have also led to the creation of unique forms of feminism, such as Black feminist theory and multiracial feminism, that actively work against both gender and race oppression.
