The term intermarriage typically refers to marriages between individuals of different socially constructed racial and ethnic groups. In the United States, however, these unions are usually defined as interracial . Such unions are often depicted as being between white and nonwhite persons, with an emphasis on white-black unions. Historically, interracial sexuality, especially between white women and nonwhite men, was forbidden in both public discourse and laws; it was legally and socially stigmatized. For white men, having sex with women of any race was acceptable as long as it was not public. Legal, political, and social restrictions against these relationships have existed at various times, and even in the early twenty-first century interracial marriage rates remain low, accounting for only 5.4 percent of all marriages in the country, according to the 2000 Census. THE EARLY HISTORY OF MISCEGENATION IN AMERICA
Maintaining racial purity within the white race has been the dominant discourse in marriage laws and intermarriage prohibitions. Historically, legal restrictions placed on inter-marriage and miscegenation have varied by state. In some states intermarriage was legal, while in others it was illegal. Miscegenation had been discouraged and treated as socially deviant since the arrival of African slaves in the American colonies, but it was not until 1691 that interracial sex was made illegal. Virginia passed the first statute against miscegenation between blacks and whites. The goal was to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another” (Wadlington 1966, p. 1192).
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, people involved in interracial sex have faced informal sanctions, punishment, and social exclusion. White women romantically or sexually involved with black men were punished, often by being banished from the colony or by being beaten and arrested. The political and social ideology centered on protecting white womanhood and demonizing black men, and free access to black women was largely held by white men in positions of power. These beliefs and social norms were never formally legalized, but the ideology penetrated the legal system. Interracial sex was constructed as deviant within the institution of slavery, and from the beginning this view was primarily aimed at preventing black male slaves from engaging in sexual relations with white women. The frequent abuse and lynching of black men for allegedly raping or desiring sexual relations with white women, as well as the widespread rape and sexual abuse of black women by white men, played an integral part in the socio-historical construction of race and the rules of race relations.
Legal sanctions, as opposed to social ones, were more often focused on interracial unions than on interracial sex. Indeed, interracial sex reified the racial divide and hierarchy through the sexual mistreatment of black women by white men, and through the severe punishment of black men who were sexually involved with a white woman. By 1940, thirty-one states had laws against interracial marriage, but only six had laws prohibiting interracial sex. But both laws and social sanctions against interracial sex and marriage were racist social constructions, formulated largely by white men to protect the “purity” of the white race and prevent racial mixture.
Interracial sex was also used as a symbol of white male privilege. Sex between black men and white women was punished, for these relations posed a threat to the power and privilege of white men. But sex between white men and black women did not threaten the white power structure, but instead reinforced the domination of white men up through the 1800s. White men had free access to black women, and these relations often involved rape or other forms of violence. Black women were oversexualized in the minds of white men, especially in contrast to white women. White men used this depiction to justify the idealization of the white woman, the degradation of black women, and the privilege awarded to white men, especially in terms of unlimited sexual access. Interracial sex did not challenge the purity of the white race because children born of white fathers and black mothers were demoted to slave status.
DEFINING RACIAL CATEGORIES
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the social construction of racial categories and the increasing desire to quantify race, particularly blackness, led to frequent modifications in the legal and social status of interracial marriage and children born of interracial relations. Children born to a black parent and a white parent were forced to assume the mothers’ status: children of slave mothers assumed the slave status, while children of white mothers were sold as indentured servants until the age of thirty. White mothers of mixed-race children had to serve five years and were then banished from the colony. These sentences of servitude and banishment often varied over time and place. The first legal efforts to classify race came in a Virginia law of 1787, which stipulated that any person having one-fourth black blood, or having any grandparent who was black, was considered black. The legal quantification of blackness and of people of color was revised until it eventually came to include any person who is not white, so that “white” legally meant any person with no trace of any other blood besides Caucasian, and having even “one drop” of “black blood” defined a person as black.
