Mixed Race Studies

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
2009-03-23
pp. 218-220

Mark Kessler, Chair of the Department of History & Government and Professor of Government
Texas Woman’s Univeristy

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638)

In this highly original and important book, Peggy Pascoe describes and analyzes three centuries of laws in the United States prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual relations. In perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic study of legal marriage and sex prohibitions to date, Pascoe argues that these laws were central ideological tools used in constituting and reproducing white supremacy in the United States. Placing her study in its broadest context, she argues that examining the rise and decline of these laws “provides a locus for studying the history of race in America” (p.2). Pascoe’s study demonstrates how historical research, combined with critical cultural theory and analysis, may shed new light on significant questions regarding the power of law and legal interpretation in constructing and reconstructing social reality.

Throughout this work, the writing is admirably accessible, while the analyses and arguments are deeply nuanced. Pascoe begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in characteristics of participants, laws, and regions of the country in which the cases arose, and to help address the broader questions of nation-building and nation-formation that emerge from this study. Pascoe uses these very human stories, along with landmark appellate court decisions and local legal practices, to explore the many and varied ways in which social and political relations based on race, gender, and sexuality illuminate the rise and fall of miscegenation law in the United States.

Pascoe’s narrative begins in the Reconstruction era, when the term “miscegenation” was first invented and applied to interracial marriage and sex. Her discussion focuses on the ways in which judges, legislators, and lawyers employed notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in conventional cultural discourses about sex, gender, and sexuality to create and apply laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. Such laws emerged first in the South and North and typically applied exclusively to relations between those categorized racially as “white” and as “black.”…

Read the entire review here.

Sociohistorical Constructions of Race and Language: Impacting Biracial Identity

A chapter in The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. By Jean Lau Chin (Editor). (Santa Barbara, California. Praeger Publishers, 2004. 1,000 pages. ISBN: 0-275-98234-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98234-8)

Matthew J. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Historically, race has been constructed within the American psyche as a dichotomous variable–and either-or proposition.  Moreover, our construction and use of language have developed to mirror the is reality, which ultimately aids in its perception.  Has this divergent approach to race outlived its usefulness and applicability?  Is it realistic, given the face of today’s changing demographic landscape?  At present, there remain cultural and linguistic disconnects between the phenomenological experience of the biracial individual and the expectations of the dualistic society within whichthey reside.  On the individual level, there are implications for psychosocial development (Hall, 2001; Root, 1995).  More broadly speaking, what will develop from the resolution of the dilemma is a new paradigm impacting how the citizens of this country view race and racial identity.  This paper explores the impact that the sociohistorical constructions to race and language have on the lives of biracial individuals.  To this end, the author, who is biracial, will blend sociohistorical conceptions of race and linguistic philosophy with personal narrative components and conclude with implications for multiracial identity development…

Read the entire chapter here.