Mixed Race Studies

The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool

The Sociological Review
Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955)
pages 65-75
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x

Maurice Broody

Some of the most urgent social problems of a cosmopolitan seaport city like Liverpool are problems of adjustment between ethnic minorities and the indigenous society into which they have migrated. This adjustment is often very difficult, and many immigrant communities suffer acutely as a result of prejudice and discrimination. Their problems have been the concern of both administrators and sociologists, and the research which has hitherto been undertaken in Liverpool into problems of race-relations has been related to the Negro communities, since it is they which are most adversely affected by racial discrimination.

The Chinese community, on the other hand, it interesting precisely because its adjustment is not regarded as a problem. In a report, which was published in 1930, Miss M.[uriel] Fletcher came to the conclusion that the Chinese, unlike the West African community, did not present a serious social problem. That judgment was confirmed four years later by Caradog Jones, whose comment on the Negro and Chinese communities still appears to be substantially true: Each community comprises about 500 adult males. In both cases, there has been widespread inter-marriage and cohabitation with white women. Here the resemblance between the two groups ceases. The Chinese appear to make excellent husbands and there is little evidence of any of their families falling into poverty, but the same cannot be said of the negroes and their families. The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

The comparatively untroubled adjustment of the Chinese may be explained partly by the fact, that local residents do not discriminate…

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The curious case of Barack Obama: A postracial black man in a racialized world

University of Houston, Clear Lake
July 2009
180 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1471005
ISBN: 9781109355192

Joel G. Carter

THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The University of Houston Clear Lake In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE

This thesis discusses the debate over Barack Obama’s race and the role it played in the 2008 presidential election, and analyzes how they expose the mechanisms that operate in a racialized society that still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and view the categorization as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after someone has been racially categorized, everything they do can be better understood through a racial lens. This discussion is organized around three racialized storylines: that Obama is (1) not black (enough), (2) black, but not too black, and (3) too black. Obama’s attempts to reshape racial discourse, which were rebuffed by the purveyors of the existing narrative, reveal that he is a postracial black man who exposes the entrenched beliefs about race that belie the notion that the U.S. is close to becoming a postracial nation.

CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• ONE: ON THE THEORY OF POSTETHNICITY
  • Postethnic Dreams from My Father
  • Terminology Disclaimers
  • Pre-emptive Pushback
• TWO: HE’S NOT BLACK (ENOUGH)
  • On Growing up White and Deciding to be Black
  • Genetic Authenticity
  • Cultural Authenticity
  • On Shelby Steele, Bound Men, and Unfortunate Subtitles
• THREE: HE’S BLACK (BUT NOT TOO BLACK)
  • Articulate, Bright, and Clean (Oh My)
  • Obama captivates White People, Wins Iowa
  • Those Amazing, Race-Transcending “Iconic Negroes”
  • The Huxtable Effect: Obama as The Cosby Show’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable
• FOUR: HE’S TOO BLACK
  • America’s Black Friend Has a Blacker Friend: Jeremiah Wright
  • The Big Speech on Race, or Obama Throws His Grandmother Under the Bus
  • He’s So Well-Spoken: Obama as the Master of Veiled Racial Rhetoric
  • The Bradley Effect and Hard-Working White Americans
• FIVE: THE ELECTION AND THE AFTERMATH
  • The Bradley Effect is a No-Show
  • On the Alleged Declining Significance of Race
  • A Generational Sea-Change?
• CONCLUSION: DEEPER BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story,… and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

—Barack Obama

In the middle of a divisive presidential race, and in front of throngs of supporters in Boston and millions of political voyeurs across the country and around the world, a tall, skinny man with light brown skin and a conspicuously deliberate syntax spoke into the microphone at the 2004 Democratic Party National Convention and declared, “There’s not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of  America.” Moments after the speech concluded, the political pundits were pontificating; the blogs were buzzing. Who was he? What was he? Three months later, he became the Junior Senator from Illinois. Two years later, he became a candidate for president, and 16 months after that, he became his party’s nominee. And that fall, in an electoral landslide victory on November 4, 2008, this man—Barack Obama—became the 44th President of the United States of America. The debate over what he is, and what that answer means for the country he was elected to lead, rages on.

The discourse surrounding Obama’s racial identity, deeply rooted in the complicated history of slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and black/white relations in this country, exposes how the United States, collectively, still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and, after this categorization is made, attempts to view it as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after a person has been racially categorized, everything he does or doesn’t do can be better (or best) understood through a racial lens. This is organized around what I call “the three memes.” …

…In this thesis, I make no attempt to engage in the sort of analysis that debates dueling definitions of blackness and racial authenticity in an attempt to declare that Obama is or isn’t black. My goal here is not to uncover the “actual” truth about Obama’s racial identity and castigate those who have not been able to do so or those who have tried but reached a conclusion different from my own. I am not looking at the inkblot and attempting to describe its “true nature,” instead, I am looking at the people who are. I dissect some of the statements made by the people who insist, suggest, or imply that a person’s race can be determined by an objective framework—say, the same type of framework that would apply to a determination of a person’s height, weight, or age. By analyzing how people respond to Obama’s racial identity, what I intend to show is that people sometimes speak as if Obama is mistaken when he describes his own racial identity—or, as Walter Benn Michaels might say, they speak as if “there is some fact of the matter independent of the perception.” Instead, I attempt to upend the argument that the U.S. is moving beyond race or is already postracial by showing just how large a force racialized thinking was during the campaign, and still is. The existing assumptions and prevailing conventional wisdom about race drown out what Obama actually says about his own identity and the role race plays in his life. A closer look at his statements—particularly Dreams from My Father, but also throughout his political career—reveals that Obama is more than the ultimate racial Rorschach test: he is a postracial black man, rendered invisible by a thoroughly
racialized society…

Purchase the thesis here.

The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race

Henry Highland Garnet

Edited by Paul Royster
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Steam press of J. C. Kneeland and Co.
1848
31 pages

The text of this electronic edition is based on the original published at Troy, New York, in 1848. It was transcribed from a facsimile edition—issued on 1969 by Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., Miami, Florida—which was photo-offset from a copy in the Fisk University Library. Except as noted below, the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitalization of the original have been preserved. Variant nineteenth-century spellings (such as “carcase” or “develope”) have been retained. Some typographical errors have been corrected and re listed below at the end of the text.

A discourse delivered at the fifteenth anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, New York, February 14, 1848.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

My theme is the Past and the Present condition, and the Destiny of the Colored race. The path of thought which you are invited to travel, has not as I am aware, been pursued heretofore to any considerable extent. The Present, is the midway between the Past and the Future. Let us ascend that sublime eminence, that we may view the vast empire of ruin that is scarcely discernable through the mists of former ages ; and if, while we are dwelling upon the desolations that meet our eyes, we shall mourn over them, I entreat you to look upward and behold the bright scenery of the future. There we have a clear sky, and from thence are refreshing breezes. The airy plains are radiant with prophetic brightness, and truth, love, and liberty are descending the heavens, bearing the charter of man’s destiny to a waiting world.

All the various forms of truth that are presented to the minds of men, are in perfect harmony with the government of God. Many things that appear to be discordant are not really so ; for when they are understood, and the mind becomes illuminated and informed, the imagined deformities disappear as spectres depart from the vision of one who had been a maniac, when his reason returns. “God is the rock, his work is perfect—a God of truth, and without iniquity. Justice and judgment are the habitations of his throne, and mercy and truth go before his face. His righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and his law is the truth.”…

…This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race. Statesmen, distinguished for their forecast, have gravely said that the blacks must either be removed, or such as I have stated will be the result. It is a stubborn fact, that it is impossible to separate the pale man and the man of color, and therefore the result which to them is so fearful, is inevitable. All this the wiser portion of the Colonizationists see, and they labor to hinder it. It matters not whether we abhor or desire such a consummation, it is now too late to change the decree of nature and circumstances. As well might we attempt to shake the Alleghanies with our hands, or to burst the rock of Gibralter with our fists. If the colored people should all consent to leave this country, on the day of their departure there would be sore lamentations, the like of which the world has not heard since Rachel wept for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not. We would insist upon taking all who have our generous and prolific blood in their veins. In such an event, the American church and state would be bereaved. The Reverend Francis L. Hawks, D. D., of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a man who is receiving the largest salary of any divine in the country, would be called upon to make the sacrifice of leaving a good living, and to share the fate of his brethren according to the flesh. The Reverend Dr. Murphy, of Herkimer, N. Y., a Presbyterian, would be compelled to leave his beloved flock ; and how could they endure the loss of a shepherd so eloquent, so faithful and so kind. We should be burdened with that renegade negro of the United States Senate, Mr. YULEE, of Florida. We should take one of the wives of Senator Samuel Houston. The consort,—the beautiful Cleopatra of his Excellency, R. M. Johnson, late Democratic Vice President of this great nation,—would be the foremost in the vast company of exiles. After we all should return to tread the golden sands of AFRICA, whether we would add to the morality of our kindred across the deep waters future generations would decide. One thing I am certain of, and that is, many of the slaveholders and lynchers of the South are not very moral now. Our cousins of the tribe of Shem are welcome to our deserters. If they are enriched by them they may be assured that we are not impoverished…

Read the entire paper here.

The Fear of Colonial Miscegenation in the British Colonies of Southeast Asia

The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 8 (2009)
pages 54-64

Katrina Chludzinski, Co-Editor

Between 1820 and 1923, European and American travelogue writers in the Southeast Asian British Colonies looked down upon Europeans participating in miscegenation with local women. They felt that it was a “barbaric” institution, and if Europeans participated in miscegenation, they were destroying the racial hierarchy that had been established during colonialism. They feared miscegenation would blur the racial lines that had been used as the basis for control over the colonies. Miscegenation also produced children of mixed races, called Eurasians. Eurasians became a separate class, however, the British and Southeast Asians did not know how to classify and treat them. Eurasians were not accepted by Europeans or Southeast Asians, they were a group of people not even recognized as a class. Why did the European and American travelogue writers fear miscegenation between Europeans and Southeast Asians? By examining European and American travelogues, I will argue that in the Southeast Asian British Colonies between the years 1820-1923, British and American travelogue writers feared miscegenation between Europeans and Southeast Asians because it challenged the existing racial structures.

For this paper I will rely exclusively on the Travelogues of Europeans and Americans. They provide a window into the culture of Southeast Asia which Southeast Asians themselves did not write about. Southeast Asian culture was new and different to European and American travelogue writers, however. As such, they documented extensively what which was foreign or strange to them. Though relying exclusively on travelogues limits this paper by excluding the Southeast Asian perspective, my purpose is to analyze the European and American perspective on Southeast Asian culture. Travelogues proved the best source for such analysis.

For the history of miscegenation in Southeast Asia, I will mainly rely on John G. Butler’s The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History 0f a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia. According to Butler, colonial miscegenation came about due to the necessity for female companionship. He goes on to speculate that concubinage occurred mainly in rural settings, and that these woman not only provided companionship, but they also helped acclimate European men to their new Southeast Asian settings. Later in his book, Butler describes how concubinage began to decline in the early twentieth century as Europeans in Southeast Asia began to make more money and were able to afford to bring European wives over…

…The British saw miscegenation as dangerous to the colonial structure because it contradicted the belief that Southeast Asians were inferior to Europeans. In one American travelogue from the Philippines, the writer compared the way that the British and the Spanish treated the natives. He commented that the British ridiculed the Portuguese and the Spanish for allowing interracial marriage. The British felt that miscegenation would result in the decline of the colonial government and even the decline of home government of the colonizing power, even though they did not explain how.  The conclusion that interracial marriage would lead to the decline of the colonial structure could only result from the fear that interracial marriage blurred the lines of the racial hierarchy that the British had established. According to the same American travelogue writer, the British believed that interracial marriage produced “mongrel,” “inferior” and “renegade” Eurasian children. The British did not know how to classify Eurasians and did not want to recognize their European descent. In order to maintain their racial hierarchy, the British needed to establish the inferiority of Eurasians in any way possible, including the use of derogatory words to describe them. Ann Stoler explains that miscegenation presented questions that Europeans were not ready to answer. One 0f those questions was how to maintain white supremacy when their racial purity was threatened by miscegenation. The British response to this question was to classify Eurasians as inferior and employed derogatory language to make them social outcasts and discourage others from participating in miscegenation.

European travelogue writers dismissed concubinage between Europeans and Southeast Asians because they did not want to admit that European men were part of the problem to the degradation of their racial structures. A British travelogue writer in Burma made excuses for British men falling into concubinage. He claimed that Burmese women had sweeter and more affectionate personalities, therefore British men could not help themselves. Ann Stoler remarks that Europeans also felt by keeping the race pure and abstaining from promiscuity, they were establishing their superiority over Southeast Asians. But concubinage would make the established racial structures harder to define, thereby making it harder to maintain their racial superiority. An interracial couple threatened the Caucasian racial purity. But they feared that if they admitted that British men were willing participants in miscegenation it would encourage other British men to do it as well. In an attempt to deter other British men from it, travelogue writers refused to admit that British men were consciously able to consent to concubinage.

To establish that British were not at fault for participating in miscegenation, other excuses were made by travelogue writers. For example, one writer claimed that Europeans could not help themselves. The climate of Southeast Asia weakened their strength to stand by their British morals. These outrageous claims were only used to remove all blame from Europeans and place it on the natives, or the climate of the colony itself…

…Miscegenation produced Eurasian children that were not European or Asian; they were a people without an identity that had the ability to change the European established racial hierarchy. Christina Firpo mentions that in Vietnam, Eurasians were clearly recognizable as being of French descent. But the French viewed this as a threat to their racial purity and superiority. A British travelogue writer noticed that Eurasians were divided amongst themselves based on how closely they resembled Europeans. The Eurasians with the skin tones and facial features that more closely resembled those of Europeans had higher social statuses than those that had features that more closely resembled Southeast Asians. ‘This made it seem like there were several racial categories within the Eurasian community. This confusion over racial hierarchies within the Eurasian community created confusion among the British. The British were confused as to how to categorize Eurasians racially. The British had established a strict racial hierarchy. They were also convinced that they would be able to maintain a racial purity amongst the Europeans. So they were not prepared when British men began to participate in miscegenation and producing another race. As Ann Stoler put it, Eurasians “straddled the divide” between colonizers and colonized. This “divide” blurred some of the racial lines between Europeans and Southeast Asians, which terrified the British.

Travelogue writers also noticed that Eurasians were disliked by both Europeans and Asians. Not only were they despised by the Europeans, but since they despised their Southeast Asian heritage, they alienated themselves even further by rejecting the Southeast Asian community. This left Eurasians isolated and alone. The British feared Eurasians because they did not know what Eurasians would do, since they were not accepted by either community. Eurasians were also alienated in their own families. One travelogue writer wrote that in Eurasian families, the lighter skinned children had more privileges than the darker skinned ones. The British feared that unrest in the Eurasian community for not having a place in the previously established racial structure might lead to political unrest. Eurasians did not belong to European or Asian societies and they suffer disadvantages for it.  They were rejected from some jobs and events because they were Eurasian. The British would not allow them access to all European events or to high ranking European jobs. Furthermore, Southeast Asians would not accept them into the Southeast Asian community. In most cases, the European father left and the family was financially cut off and without a father. Having their European fathers leave lead to feelings of abandonment and alienation as well. In some cases, when the European father left, the family became poor. So not only were the Eurasian children alienated from most communities, they were left with no means to support themselves….

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Transcultural Transformation: African American and Native American Relations

University of Nebraska
November 2009
139 pages

Barbara S. Tracy

A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by denying one or the other something is lost. Claiming the relationship turns transcultural transformation into a powerful response. Working from Henry Gates’ explanation of signifying combined with Houston Baker’s description of blues literature, I examine signifying, call and response, and blues/jazz elements in the work of three writers to discover the collective lives of African Americans, Native Americans, and Black Indians. In the writing of Black-Cherokee Alice Walker, I look for the call and response of both African and Native American story-ways. I find these same elements in the writing of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie, in his blues writings and his revision of Robert Johnson’s and other stories. In the work of Creek/Cherokee Craig Womack, I examine a Creek/Cherokee perspective of Black Creeks and Freemen. In all of these works, I find that the shared African American and Native American experience plainly takes place in these works in a variety of ways in which the authors call upon oral and written story, song, and dance, and create a response that clearly signifies the combined power of these shared experiences. This is a fusion of shared traditions with differences that demonstrate the blending of voices and culture between two peoples who have been improvising together for a long time.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Speaking of Things Yet Unspoken: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians
• 1. The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian: Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility
• 2. Crossroads: The African American and Native American Blues Matrix in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues
• 3. “Red is Red”: Transcultural Convergence and Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire
• Conclusion: Common Ground: Let the Music Start
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Film You Didn’t See – Who’s the Alien, Cowboy?

Cultural Weekly
2011-08-25

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ulli K. Ryder, Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

Chances are you didn’t see Cowboys and Aliens. The film won’t get to $100 million box office in the US, and it is sinking fast overseas as well.  There’s even been collateral damage—in the wake of its lackluster performance, Disney has put the brakes on the even-more-expensive Lone Ranger, to have starred Johnny Depp.
 
Cowboys and Aliens didn’t get audience traction because of mixed genres and mixed reviews, but the most intriguing aspect audiences and critics alike missed is the film’s approach to mixed races and mixed species.  The movie is an overt critique of colonialism and racism.  Think we’re reaching for subtext?  Well, it’s about as obvious as a gigantic spaceship hovering over the Western sky…

Read the entire article here.

Summer Blend Book Club Wraps Up

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-08-25

Michel Martin, Host

This series began in June with the help of Heidi Durrow, author and co-founder of the “Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival.” All summer long, Tell Me More has been covering books about the multicultural experience in America. Durrow checks back in with host Michel Martin to discuss the novels in the program’s Summer Blend Book Club.

MICHEL MARTIN, host: As we said earlier, our Summer Blend book series has taken us deep into the experience of the emerging story of mixed-race Americans.

We decided to end where we began, with a conversation with author Heidi Durrow. She is the author of the bestseller “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.” She cofounded the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival, and she helped us kick off our series back in June. And she joins us once again from NPR West.

Heidi, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us, and thank you for helping us with the series.

HEIDI DURROW: Thanks for having me back….

Read the transcript here.  Listen to the interview (00:06:30) here, download it here.

The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875-1935

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 23, Number 3 (2002)
pages 29-54
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2003.0009

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

At a lavish wedding and reception in New York City in 1891 Elaine Goodale, daughter of a prominent New England family, married Charles Eastman, a member of the Wahpeton band of the Santee Sioux (Dakotas). Writing in her memoirs Elaine declared, “I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” Charles, a medical doctor, described himself a few months before their marriage by writing, “I was soon to realize my long dream—to become a complete man! I thought of little else than the good we two could do together.” Both Charles and Elaine were members of a group of reformers who sought to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation, and they portrayed their marriage as a natural means to overcome Indian “backwardness” and poverty. The white woman would further uplift her already civilized Dakota husband, and the couple would work diligently to serve his people.

Fifty years later New York socialite Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her Russian émigré husband, the painter Maurice Sterne. Mabel soon became entranced with Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Describing her feelings, Mabel wrote in her memoirs:

I had a strange sense of dislocation, as though I were swinging like a pendulum over the gulf of the canyon, between the two poles of mankind, between Maurice and Tony; and Maurice seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body, with his power unbroken and hard like the carved granite rock, yet older than the Germanic Russian whom the modern world had destroyed.

Mabel and Tony eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1923. In this case Mabel saw herself as a bridge between Tony’s people and her own; she envisioned her marriage not as a vehicle by which to uplift and “serve her husband’s people,” but as a means to save her own race from the destruction wrought by the modern world.

The stories of the Eastmans’ and Luhans’ marriages contain all the necessary ingredients for two “racy” novels but they also provide more than voyeuristic romances. As Peggy Pascoe has written, “For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage.” Both the Eastmans and the Luhans operated at the outer boundaries of American racial norms. Yet, through writing and speaking about their marriages, both couples worked to transform the racial ideologies of their times. Similarly both couples were bound by the gender norms of their respective eras but they also actively reshaped gender and sexual conventions…

…As Pascoe argues, a study of interracial marriage can also yield a greater understanding of the construction of gender norms as well. Just as with the study of race, women’s historians and other feminist theorists have for decades documented the fleeting nature of gender norms and argued that gender is not a fixed set of notions that directly correlates with biological differences between the male and female sex. Many scholars of intermarriage have ignored gender; they have made little distinction between attitudes toward and laws aimed at relationships between white men and nonwhite women and those directed toward unions between white women and nonwhite men.10 But, as a growing number of other historians have shown, American society has had markedly different attitudes toward interracial marriage depending on the gender of the white person involved. In general, interracial relationships between white men of the colonizing, dominant group and nonwhite women of colonized, conquered, and/or enslaved groups have been tolerated. Although laws in many colonies and states forbid interracial marriage between white men and black women, for example, many white slave owners commonly engaged in forced sex, concubinage, and informal relationships with their female slaves without social opprobrium. As we shall see, relationships between white men and Indian women were similarly tolerated within American society. Liaisons between white men and nonwhite women did not violate the hierarchical order that developed between European Americans, African Americans, and American Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism, conquest, and domination.

As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out, however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage. When white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married, they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order, white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law, white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men, therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white…

Read the entire article here.