What Comes Naturally Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

by Pascoe, Peggy

• ISBN13: 9780195094633
• ISBN10: 0195094638
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members ofother races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racialhierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck downmiscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Author Biography

Peggy Pascoe is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Engendering miscegenation	p. 17
Sexualizing miscegenation law	p. 47
Configuring race in the American West	p. 77
The facts of race in the courtroom	p. 109
Seeing like a racial state	p. 131
Between a rock and a hard place	p. 163
Interracial marriage as a natural right	p. 205
Interracial marriage as a civil right	p. 246
Lionizing Loving	p. 287
The ghost of the past	p. 307
Acknowledgments	p. 315
Abbreviations	p. 319
Notes	p. 323
Index	p. 391
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