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REVIEWS
| Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954. By Alex Lubin (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 224 pp.).
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| Alex Lubin's alternatively thought-provoking and frustrating new study explores the meanings of interracial intimacy in American politics and culture in the ten years following World War II. Focusing primarily on black-white relationships—because, Lubin argues, the bulk of the sources relate to black-white relationships and because relationships between blacks and whites engendered far more controversy than other kinds of interracial pairings—Lubin asserts that World War II created new conditions which gave rise to a form of politics centered on black intimacy with whites. Although the courts and postwar popular culture sought to keep interracial intimacy in the private sphere and to contain the political transformations it could engender, the black press and at least some black civil rights activists celebrated examples of black-white romances and marriages and embraced interracial intimacy as a civil rights issue. |
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Lubin begins Romance and Rights by explaining how World War II enabled interracial intimacy to become viewed as a civil rights issue. For the first time, domestic racial discrimination became a liability to American foreign policy, as the United States positioned itself as the protector of freedom and democracy opposing first Nazi Germany, and later, the USSR. The United States framed itself as the land of tolerance, opportunity, and racial harmony, at least in opposition to totalitarianism. The war helped discredit biological racism, making it harder to oppose interracial marriage on the grounds that blacks were biologically inferior. Under these new conditions, examples of black and white intimacy could be viewed as proof that white racism was waning and that blacks were worthy partners for whites. |
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