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.

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Volume 13,  Number 4 (April 2003)

Barbara L. Graham, Professor of Political Science,
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader. By Kevin R. Johnson (Editor). (New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. 505 pages. Cloth ISBN: 0-8147-4256-4. Paper ISBN: 0-8147-4257-2)

In Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader, Kevin R. Johnson has edited one of the most important and timely anthologies on the general topic of race mixture and the law. The anthology addresses a range of provocative issues concerning the mixed race experience and the law and its impact on mixed race peoples. For readers who are unfamiliar with the vast literature on the mixed race experience, I am confident that they will find this book’s interdisciplinary approach indispensable in its grappling with issues raised by multiracialism and the law. Johnson’s book, part of the Critical America Series published by New York University Press, takes critical race theory into another direction in its emphasis on mixed race scholarship.  As with many of the writings of critical race theorists, Johnson’s book has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom of the black-white paradigm. The writings persuasively demonstrate that America has always been a mixed race society, that the law has played a major role in shaping racial categories, classification schemes, intermarriage, immigration and trans-racial adoption issues to name a few. Race is addressed as a social construct and Johnson – as well as the other contributors – acknowledges how law has not kept up with the fluid racial boundaries in the American context. This book covers the diversity of the mixed race experience in America, including African American, Indian, Latina(o) and Asian populations. Johnson argues in the introduction that “racial mixture will undoubtedly shape the future study of race and civil rights in the United States. As minorities of many different types intermarry and rates of immigration of diverse peoples to this country remain high, more racial mixtures and mixed race peoples will emerge.”  The writings in the anthology take the reader on a journey in an effort to understand the complexities of racial mixture in the United States and abroad.

Johnson has carefully selected eighty-seven edited scholarly writings, primarily law review articles published in the 1990s and a few court cases.  The reader is divided into twelve parts in an attempt to examine the complexities of racial categories and what they mean for a mixed race society.  Part I addresses the history and slow demise of anti-miscegenation laws. The edited selections cover issues such as an historical overview of these laws, the history of racial identification and the regulation of interracial sex in colonial Virginia, and the relationship between lynchings and interracial relationships.  As expected, Johnson includes writings on an analysis of Loving v. Virginia (1967) and its impact.  Readers may be unfamiliar with an important precursor to Loving, Perez v. Sharp (1948), where the California Supreme Court held that the state anti-miscegenation law violated the Constitution.  Going beyond the white-black context, the other writings in Part I cover attempts to regulate intermarriage between Indians and whites and Asians and whites…

Read the entire review here.

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Vol. 18 No.9 (2008-09-15)
pp. 788-791

Daniel Lipson, Professor of Political Science
State University of New York, New Paltz

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation. By Lauren L. Basson. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 256 pages.)

At a moment in United States history when Barack Obama is inspiring millions in his presidential bid, the reality of mixed-race Americans is becoming increasingly salient in a nation long obsessed with dichotomous black and white racial categories. With the population of people of color in the United States accelerating at rates unmatched by any other country in the world, racial discourse in the US has gradually come to accommodate the full cast of official minorities, moving beyond the limited focus on blacks and whites. Yet the historical precedent in the United States has been to leave little space for mixed-raced Americans, instead preserving the racial order by forcing them into monoracial categories. As Lauren Basson explains in White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation, the turn of the 20th century proved to be a highly dynamic period that left a major imprint on the distinctive American model of racial categorizations…

Read the entire review here.