MISCEGENATION
Mulatto
Miscegenation is sexual intercourse between individuals of differing racial
groups. The interbreeding of Whites and non-Whites.
Miscegenation is mixing of people considered to be of different racial types.
Miscegenation is mixing of genes.
Miscegenated means produced by miscegenation, that is produced of mixed descent.
At various times and places (including the American south and South Africa under
apartheid) there have been laws prohibiting both sexual intercourse and marriage between
racially mixed couples.
The Supreme Court of the United States struck down miscegenation laws in the year
1967. In the United States, the state laws prohibited the marriage of whites and blacks,
and many state laws prohibited the intermarriage of whites with Native Americans or
Asians. In the U.S., such laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws.
The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United States.
Cruz, Barbara C.; Berson, Michael J. OAH Magazine of History, v15 n4 p80-84 Sum 2001
Abstract: Explores miscegenation in U.S. history, some motivations for anti-miscegenation
policy, and the landmark decision of the 1967 case of "Loving v. Virginia."
Includes three recent examples of miscegenation policy in the United States with questions
for class discussion.
A Quantitative History of Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the United States,
1880-1940
Washington, Scott Leon - Presented at the annual meeting of the The Law and Society
Association
Abstract: Putting to work an independently compiled dataset containing over 30 decades and
300 years of anti-miscegenation activity in the United States (1661-1967), the current
paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the spread and intensification of
anti-miscegenation statutes, in states across the country, between 1880 and 1940. With the
help of ArcGIS (a geographic information systems package), it takes a detailed look at the
overall levels of anti-miscegenation activity that prevailed during the 1880-1940
period—and, employing a severity index that I developed and used in an earlier essay,
it tracks changes in the *definitions used* (for the purposes of each statute), as well as
changes in the *penalties prescribed* (under the terms of each statute). After identifying
why 1880-1940 was such a peculiar period in the history of anti-miscegenation legislation,
the paper furnishes a series of contagion models predicting the anti-miscegenation
profiles of *individual* states as a function of the anti-miscegenation profiles of
*adjacent* states, in four, geographically distinct regions: the South, the West, the
Midwest, and the Northeast. Throughout, preliminary findings are discussed with respect to
a larger, book-length project examining the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the
United States between 1890 and 1935.
Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance
By Katharine Nicholson Ings, Manchester College
This essay surveys recent scholarship on interracial romance during the nineteenth century
using the hoax Miscegenation pamphlet of 1863 as a lens. An anonymous and ironic piece of
writing that promoted race-mixing from a deceptively Republican perspective, Miscegenation
coined the titular term, newly situating interracial relationships within a Latinate,
pseudo-scientific framework. It also encouraged romance between white women and black men,
an endorsement that was designed to enrage its white male readership but in fact gave hope
to some white women who were unable to articulate their interracial desire publicly. Using
this double focus, I explore how nineteenth-century authors of interracial romance
borrowed the language of science, such as “hybridity” and “crossing”;
how they employed the concept of “blood-mixing” as both sexual and medicinal
(via transfusions); and I read the Miscegenation pamphlet as a kind of scientific romance
fiction itself.
Slavery's Shadow Families: Rethinking Miscegenation Regulation
Davis, Adrienne - Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Law and Society
Association
Abstract: Two narratives of interracial intimacy have dominated U.S. culture. The first
story is about the rules states erected prohibiting and punishing interracial intimacy.
Miscegenation regulation appears to be the sexual manifestation of social apartheid, and
law worked to secure sexual racial apartheid. The second narrative of interracial intimacy
is about antebellum slavery and its sexual injustices and injuries. Criminal law excluded
enslaved black women from protection from rape while the status rules dictated that a
child’s status as slave or free was inherited from the mother, without regard to the
father. These legal rules allowing sexual and reproductive commodification and coercion
secured white male sexual access to black women, the conceptual converse of sexual racial
apartheid. Slavery comprised a sexually libertarian regime, one in which white men could
pursue their intimate interests at will. Each of these two narratives represents the
injuries of miscegenation regulation in very specific ways, as reinforcing racial
hierarchies by securing sexual apartheid or by inflicting racial injury by protecting
white men’s unfettered sexual access to black women. This paper exposes the limits of
both of these dominant stories about interracial intimacy governance and some of the
contemporary claims they have generated. It shows how a crucial, yet under-attended, task
of rules managing interracial intimacy was to guard against the threats posed by otherwise
authorized interracial intimacy and unconstrained white male sexual liberty. Neither an
understanding of miscegenation rules as sexual racial apartheid nor as sexual
libertarianism predicts or accounts for law’s management of interracial intimacy.
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