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Book Review
| Rachel Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 271. $30 (ISBN 0-226-53662-9).
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| Laws that banned sex and marriage across racial lines had a long history in America. Tracing this history over the course of more than three centuries, Rachel Moran argues that such laws primarily served three purposes. First and foremost, they helped establish and perpetuate racial boundaries and the inequalities that accompanied those boundaries, by creating and entrenching the inferiority of those not blessed with whiteness. Despite the laws, however, whites and nonwhites continued to have sexual relations, and they produced children whose mere existence threatened idealized racial lines. This reality meant in turn that legislators also had to design laws that might contain the ambiguity that potentially challenged the maintenance of a strict racial order. Finally, Moran describes how laws against interracial sex and marriage played central roles in defining standards of sexual and marital propriety, as bourgeois whites viewed their own nuclear and patriarchal family ideal as "normal," in contradistinction to the supposedly immoral and pathologically deviant sexual and marital choices of people of color and of any white person intimately associated with them. |
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Even while generalizing about the intent and impact of the laws on the intimate lives of Americans, Moran is careful to delineate how such legislation shaped the lives of different groups of people in distinct ways over time. She distinguishes among the experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians in the United States, reveals the varying racial and ethnic assumptions of legislators and judges as they created and upheld anti-miscegenation laws, and documents how changing understandings of race, sex, and marriage eventually undermined the very premises of those laws, leading to the removal of many of the limitations on the choices Americans could legally make about their personal lives. |
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Moreover, Moran smartly demonstrates the persistent legacy of racial and sexual regulation in modern America, and the direct linkages between the past and the present. Tracing current discussions and debates over matters like interracial marriage, transracial adoption, interracial custody battles, and racial census categories, Moran shows how policymakers and other public officials are stuck on the horns of what seems an indissoluble dilemma, caught between their sense that we ought to make concerted efforts to move toward a truly egalitarian society in which race no longer matters, and the reality that in so many ways, it still very much does. As Moran puts it, the result of such a quandary is "an inescapable indeterminacy, as officials navigate between the world that might have been in the absence of racial discrimination and the world that exists after centuries of racial separation and subordination" (144). |
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Given the continuing salience of such matters, Moran's is an important subject, which makes it all the more frustrating that the book is marred by some critical errors of historical fact and interpretation that distort its analysis, particularly as Moran sees the experiences of Africans and their descendants with laws regulating race and sex. Most glaring is Moran's repeated claim that in an effort to set firm racial boundaries and contain racial ambiguity, every southern state had adopted a "one-drop rule" of racial definition by the outbreak of the Civil War, marking all persons with even the most remote African ancestry with blackness and thus consigning them to a formally inferior status. Such an assertion is simply false. A more thorough reading of the secondary literature or an examination of southern legal codes would have revealed that in fact, not even one southern state had a "one-drop rule" on the books before the Civil War. On the contrary, by the 1850s nearly every southern state defined the boundary between black and white such that persons with some significant African ancestry (as much as one-quarter "black blood" in five Confederate states, and one-eighth in four others) were considered legally white. And such laws hardly disappeared with the end of slavery. In Virginia, for example, the Racial Integrity Act established the state's "one-drop rule" for the first time. It became law only in 1924. |
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Such a misconstruction of the legal order under slavery precludes a precise understanding not only of the relationship between racism and slavery, but also of the complex interplay between legal codes and social reality when it came to how southern whites understood the positions of persons of mixed ancestry. Moran is hardly unaware of such subtleties, but she presents them as exceptions to the larger rule of a rigidly enforced color line rather than as reflective of a general trend where some racial elasticity was well established in law throughout the South. Moreover, Moran's misapprehension of the antebellum color line leads her to conflate somewhat the racial regime of slavery and that of segregation, which she argues both "depended on a clearcut distinction between blacks and whites" (43). If slavery depended on such absolutely firm distinctions, one wonders why southern legislators failed to make the laws accord to such a need. |
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Finally, a more accurate explanation of the subtleties of race under slavery might have given Moran some greater insight to the dilemmas of our own era. Rather than seeing the modern, indeterminate understanding of race and its importance as something with which Americans have historically little legal experience, one might argue that we are now witnessing a return to a more flexible understanding of color lines, albeit under very different circumstances. |
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| Joshua D. Rothman
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| University of Alabama |
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