Powell
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 Posted: Wed 16 Feb 2005 23:48 Post subject: Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 18901934 |
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Racial Constructions: The Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 18901934
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/20.2/novkov.html
excerpts:
| Quote: | This double standard changed in the postwar period. As Mary Frances Berry has argued, controlling whites' sexual behavior after the Civil War meant more than just curbing any attempt on the part of white women to engage in sexual relations with black men. While actors in the legal system were cautious about limiting white men's sexual behavior, judges and juries recognized a tension between allowing complete license for white men and upholding norms of support and nurture for white women.14 The protection of white women, however, was not the only justification for pursuing white male miscegenators. Cheryl Harris's work on whiteness as property suggests that whites had a common interest in preserving the purity of whiteness as a racial identity for a myriad of concrete legal and economic privileges, as well as for the psychological benefits.15 As the analysis shows, bans on miscegenation clearly sought to limit white men's capacity to threaten whiteness by producing with their black partners children who could potentially pass for white.
14 Mary Frances Berry, "Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South," Journal of American History 78 (1991): 85455.
15 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 170995. |
| Quote: | Attitudes about race, as suggested above, were in transition. The late nineteenth-century cases dealt with race in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. In Barbara Welke's analysis of discrimination by common carriers, she notes specifically that many of the plaintiffs were light-skinned mulattos who had all of the markers of class status, but the courts did not question their race.47
47 Welke points out that many of the plaintiffs were indeed trying to differentiate themselves from the lower class whites and Negroes who traveled in the smoker cars on trains. Welke, "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men," 28489. |
| Quote: | Much of the tension over miscegenation rested in the contradictions inherent in thinking about blood. If black blood could be successfully concealed, why was it problematic? On the one hand, both scientists and popular writers agreed that the white race was superior in most ways to the black race and that the natures of both races were determined by genetics. Mulattoes' success in becoming the leaders of the black race was solely due to the dominance of superior intelligence and refinement, which was a direct result of the white blood flowing through their veins.65 They aspired to membership in the social class of whites because they were misplaced with the lower fully black race. 54
If this were the whole story, there would be no reason to worry about racial mixture. White blood would simply overwhelm black blood and mask its damaging qualities; the mixture of blacks with whites would ultimately bring the black race closer to the level of the white race. The story was, however, more complex. Along with these beliefs, many people simultaneously believed that black blood had an almost magical quality that enabled it to overcome white blood, even when it was only present in the smallest quantities.
65 Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 355. |
| Quote: | Prosecutors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primarily concerned with maintaining the sanctity of marriage, which was for the state much more than a simple contract. Miscegenation undermined legitimate marriage by making a mockery of the ordered and separate white family and by threatening to produce an unthrifty mongrel race that would inevitably fail. Race itself, however, was not in question, since from a white standpoint, blacks' alien nature and appearance made them readily identifiable to the most casual of observers. Neither whiteness nor blackness needed to be defined under these conditions, since the vast gulf between them set them permanently apart. 129
This way of thinking about race began to shift dramatically in the early twentieth century. During the 1910s, eugenics emerged on the national political scene, and racist practitioners of eugenics wrote extensively in the 1920s. The discourse of eugenics focused on the concept of blood and mixed blood, portraying racial mixing as a threat to the culture and very nationhood of the United States. Race became increasingly linked with heredity, a fact that caused many pamphleteers to call for more strict rules regarding miscegenation. Scientific reliance on unitary notions of heredity gave new cachet to old fears about the contamination of white blood by black blood; since racial characteristics were believed to be passed on in a unitary fashion, the stain of blackness could never be erased by genetic chance. |
| Quote: | The history of appellate litigation reflects the ways that popular understandings of race both drove and were driven by the law. To the extent that the law could successfully bar mixed-race sexual relationships, the state could maintain the color line and prevent the growth of a class of dissatisfied and rebellious mulattoes. Such mulattoes were a threat to whiteness, because they could be expected to challenge constantly both in their overt actions and in their very existence the permanent division between social and political equality that early interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment had endorsed. Later, they posed a serious challenge to the ongoing project of constructing whiteness.162
162 Hale, Making Whiteness, 28488. |
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