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Book Review
| Elise Virginia Lemire, "Miscegenation": Making Race in America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 204. $35.00 (ISBN 0-8122-3664-5).
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| Northern society's abolitionist legacy often obscures the importance of slavery and racial inequality to the history of the region, particularly with regard to the study of inter-racial sex and marriage. Those seeking to understand the dynamics of black-white coupling often turn to the south or the post–Civil War era, neglecting the existence of similar liaisons in the colonial or antebellum north. Elise Lemire fills this gap by establishing a pedigree for the concept of "miscegenation" in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania between 1776 and 1865. The author sets out to understand how a mid-nineteenth-century neologism "became the most popular means used to refer to racial mixing for the next hundred years and more" (140). Her answer strikes at the centrality of race and sex for the narrative of post-Revolutionary America, intertwining the naturalization of sexual impulses with values and practices of freedom, class, science, whiteness, and family. |
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With this work, Lemire joins the growing ranks of scholars who interpret race and sex as overlapping categories. The author is at her most interesting when she depicts "race" as an imagined concept intimately linked to sexual impulses and aesthetic preferences. Drawing on what she calls the "taste argument" (8), Lemire explains how depictions of African-Americans as "universally ugly" (3) made intra-racial, as opposed to inter-racial unions, seem a biological necessity for white northerners. The initial vocabulary for this complex emerged during the Sally Hemings controversy of the early 1800s. When New England Federalist poetry lampooned Thomas Jefferson's choice of a sexual partner known for her undesirable color and thick lips, it defined sexual desire as "preference," a concept based in social practice and defined as desire for the repulsive. Rehearsed social behaviors morphed into perceived physical certainties during the anti-abolitionist riots of the late 1830s. "Preference" transformed into "amalgamation" when pro-slavery forces combined idioms of "blood," changing assumptions of marriage and family, and scientific theories of polygenesis to critique the rumored predilection for African-American partners on the part of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. The process of "biologizing" (5) inter-racial sex culminated with the Civil War and the publication of an anti-Lincoln tract that coined the word "miscegenation." The two New York Democrats responsible for the text used the new word to slander their Republican rivals, consolidate whiteness as an accessible group identity, and alleviate popular fears regarding emancipation. |
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Conspicuously absent from the author's genealogy are references to the offspring of inter-racial unions, an omission with implications for the political and social byproducts of "miscegenation." For Lemire, it was aesthetic preferences, and not the threat of a multi-racial class of voters and laborers, that defined white resistance to racial equality in the north. Lemire claims that by equating Jefferson's repugnant sexual preferences with his political beliefs, for instance, Federalist propaganda limited the scope of political freedom, what the author refers to as "liberal democracy" (17), for African-Americans. Fast-forward thirty years to Philadelphia and similar notions made themselves plain regarding the urban middle class. The author argues that Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" contributed to the limited social and economic opportunities of black professionals by depicting black barbers as repugnant orangutans bent on sexual violence against white women. |
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Essentially, the author seeks a causal relationship among aesthetic values, naturalized behaviors, and the limited status of African-American society. At one point, she states that these depictions were "'doing the work' of prohibiting what we now call 'inter-racial' sex and marriage and of thereby limiting 'black' economic and social mobility" (3). The assertion is laudable, though it could have benefited from more analysis. Grounding the outcome of "miscegenation" in a tangible political or social reality requires a connection among language, audience, and those institutions responsible for enforcing racial inequality. For instance, more than any other instrument of group definition, the law effectively converted society's cultural code into political and economic practice. This fact seems particularly relevant once juxtaposed against Republican attempts to limit the black vote in New York and elsewhere after 1812, as well as the numerous African-American professionals denied licenses by city authorities to practice trades such as hack men or peddlers. Connecting concepts such as "amalgamation" to the juridical languages and practices underpinning the slavery debate, the Republican elections, or the sectional crisis would provide a more convincing, and more interesting, argument. |
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Another way for the author to affirm the cultural and political power of "miscegenation" is through the impressive array of sources at her disposal. Lemire should be complimented for integrating a vast range of literary and pictorial representations into her analysis, including paintings, novels, lithographs, and poetry. However, an examination of the backgrounds of the people reading these diverse sources, as well as an analysis of how different sources taught ideas differently, would have benefited her analysis. Did Federalist poetry teach racial and sexual epistemologies to Republicans in the same manner as Federalists? Were pro-slavery writers skilled at employing certain sources instead of others? Without answers to such questions, the creative jostling over inter-racial sex comes off as too much posturing by plotting political factions, undermining the author's own commendable attempts to implicate all participants in the different debates and crises, including Jefferson and Garrison, in the making of "miscegenation." Meanwhile, lack of a precise relationship among ideas, audience, and institutions such as the law or print culture keeps the reader from realizing the true power of race and sex to bind America in a relationship that, the author rightly concludes in her epilogue, still exists today. |
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| James J. Allegro
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| Case Western Reserve University |
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