Book Review

Canada and the United States

In the United States, racial legislation regulating intimate relations established boundaries of sexual and marital propriety. The law shaped, and was shaped by, academic, medical, and popular norms of deviance conveyed through a broad array of gendered images associating sex across the color line with pathological sexuality. Rachel F. Moran adds to a body of literature that cumulatively demonstrates that the public fiction of race categories is deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Identifying "separate but equal" families as one of the most durable legacies of legal and political racism, Moran's historical survey further demonstrates that race, not culture, continues to mediate social identities and cleavages. An obstinate refusal to acknowledge racial segregation as a salient characteristic of American family life reflects a deep belief in the romantic ideology of love, which presumes coincidence and freedom of choice. Moran looks beyond idiosyncratic attractions as a primary explanation for intimate choices of love and marriage and instead attends to the ways in which racist predispositions continue to regulate emotions and interpersonal relations. Through a close examination of the history of antimiscegenation laws, their dismantlement, and contemporary debates about intimate interracial relationships, Moran persuasively insists on the necessity of analyzing the role of race as a key variable in calculating the costs and benefits of familial ties.

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