Karen A. Getman
Sexual liaisons that cross the color line have been intertwined in American history with issues of gender, race, politics, and law from the colonial period onward. The word "miscegenation" was invented during the 1864 presidential campaign (from the Latin miscere, "to mix," and genus, race) when Democrats claimed that Lincoln's Republican Party advocated sex and marriage across the color line. Like "mulatto," probably derived from the concept of mules and hybridity, "miscegenation" was pejorative in its historical context.
Europeans and Africans reproduced together from the time of earliest contact in the colonial South, where white indentured servants and Black slaves lived and labored in the same households. White authorities wrote the first laws against such mixtures in the late seventeenth century; white women and Black men were threatened with the harshest consequences among the possible mixtures. Under the institution of racial slavery, such laws were intended to prevent the growth of a free African American population. One's legal status as slave or free was based on the mother's status as slave or free; thus when white women had children with Black men, those children would be free but of partial African ancestry, thereby threatening racial slavery. When Black women bore the children of white men, however, those children would be slaves and usually remain enslaved throughout their lives, thereby benefiting the institution of racial slavery.
Black women and their families in the South suffered continuous sexual exploitation, or the threat of it, by white masters. Historical documents testify to the anger and humiliation female slaves experienced in the face of their masters' cruelty. Although the women's resistance remained constant, their efforts often proved futile in a patriarchal slave society. Southern courts did not recognize the rape of Black women by white men as a crime.
Under slavery it was much less frequent, though not impossible, for white women to have sexual liaisons with Black men. Dominant ideology deemed these white women, especially the poorer ones, as depraved agents of illicit actions, and they were usually treated as outcasts; elite white women were more likely to exercise social power and remain out of the public eye if their cross-racial relationships were discovered. Planter-class white women in the slave South also commanded power over Black men, including the power of sexual coercion.
In the antebellum North, liaisons between African Americans and whites were socially taboo at least until the Civil War ended, despite the fact that not all Northern states had laws against intermarriage. Voluntary cross-racial liaisons did occur, though many others were exploitive, usually occurring in the context of poverty. As members of the laboring poor, Black women were subject to exploitation from white employers, and Black and white women who were struggling economically might temporarily or permanently engage in prostitution, serving Black and white men alike.
After emancipation, white Southerners viciously targeted white women and Black men who engaged in sexual liaisons together. These Southerners wished fervently to retain their place at the top of the racial hierarchy. They conflated the new political power and economic independence of Black men with sexual transgressions against white women, ignoring the long history of sexual assault of Black women by white men under slavery. As part of this process of countering African American freedom, Black women were also subject to assault and rape by Klansmen and their allies, and white women who consorted, or allegedly consorted, with Black men were also vulnerable to white violence. Thus full-fledged, racist white rage about sex between Black men and white women developed in the Reconstruction years, commencing an era of terrorism and lynchings which ultimately spread north and west. By the early twentieth century, marriages across the color line were rendered explicitly illegal in the South, as well as in parts of the North and West. The consequences of interracial marriages ranged from simply declaring such unions null and void to imposing fines or imprisonment. Such laws were most frequently enforced against white women and Black men.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Black women began to organize nationally. Journalist and activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett candidly called attention to the newfound, intense white anxiety about sex between white women and Black men. She demonstrated that lynching was part of a political campaign to suppress Black male suffrage and economic independence. She noted also that fears of sexuality had not existed when white Southern men had deserted their households when they went to fight in the Civil War, leaving their wives, daughters, and male slaves at home. In 1930 a group of white, middle-class Southern women formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which asserted that white women suffered also under an ideology that cast Black men as rapists and white women as victims in need of protection from white men. Over the next decades, small numbers of those who lived in Northern and Western states married across the color line, especially after World War II. In the South, liaisons still took the form of concubinage between Black women and white men, though to a much lesser degree than during the slavery period.
The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, involving the marriage of a Black woman and a white man, reached the United States Supreme Court after nine years of trials and appeals. The Court ruled unanimously that laws prohibiting marriages between Blacks and whites were unconstitutional; at that time, sixteen Southern states had such laws. While the number of mixed couples has increased in the second half of the twentieth century, the percentage is still small. White women and Black men make up the majority of mixed couples; this phenomenon caused considerable tension between Black and white women during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Many African Americans, while recognizing legal sanctions against intermarriage as racist and a violation of rights, have looked down on other Blacks who consorted with whites. Many white Americans have continued to respond to mixed couples with racist attitudes.
The ongoing legacies of the legal and social history of miscegenation are apparent in issues ranging from the influence of racist ideology in sex crimes or alleged sex crimes, to ambivalence or antagonism on the part of both white and Black communities toward marriages and relationships across the color line.
Karen A. Getman, "Sexual Control in the Slaveholding South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System," Harvard Women's Law Journal Vol. 7 (1984): 115-52; Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, rev. ed., 1993); Nell Irvin Painter, "'Social Equality,' Miscegenation, Labor, and Power," The Evolution of Southern Culture, edited by Numan Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988)..
Martha HodesAlso: Colorism Violence Against WomenWhiteness
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