which ideologies about racial difference and especially the supposed inferiority of nonwhites drew on portrayals of sexual difference and deviance. As race cohered as an ideology for categorizing the people of the world in a hierarchy (especially in slave societies like that which developed in the United States), hypersexuality—or supposedly illicit and excessive, uncontrollable sexual desire—became a key marker of racial inferiority. The changing reception of a character like Othello makes one wonder, might the acceptance of sexual desire signaled by the emergence of heterosexuality somehow diminish the stigma of sexual racism and undercut the opposition to cross-race relationships that served as a foundation of the United States’ racial/sexual system?
Or would history show that as the sexual system evolved in the United States, middle-class whites could legitimate their own more passionate sexual desires as respectable and properly heterosexual by defining them against a stigmatized other, an other that would include not only the new category of “homosexuals,” who engaged in same-sex acts, but also interracial couples, who too engaged in sexual acts with what most saw as an improper object choice? As heterosexuality became decisively normative, shifting from its turn-of-the century definition of a “perverse” desire for the opposite sex to its 1934 dictionary definition of “normal sexuality,”5 was it in part because same-race couples could go to a “black and tan” club, watch interracial mixing, and craft their own more respectable heterosexual identity in opposition to a deviant margin? Othello’s story did not end in the eighteenth century; instead, black men like him who desired and married white women would again end up as outsiders, heterosexuals perhaps but certainly not heteronormative, at least not in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and, arguably, still not today.
This chapter asks what interraciality, or the experience of interracial couples, can tell us about the history of heterosexuality. And it explores what a focus on heterosexuality might reveal about the history of interracial sexuality, too. My analysis takes seriously the historian Kevin Mumford’s call that we consider interraciality as a category of analysis. In his book Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, Mumford contends that “interracial relations on the margins” are “central to understanding the character of modern American culture.”6 What does heterosexuality look like when we move interraciality from the margins to the center? What do we learn about the power and limits of heterosexuality, as well as how it became and has served as a normative category that structures politics, society, and culture, when we focus on the history and experience of interracial couples?
Drawing on both my own work on black-white interracial marriage and a wide scholarship on interracial sexual and marital relationships throughout US history, I argue that interraciality and heterosexuality have a complicated and ambivalent relationship, one that ensures that the experiences of heterosexual interracial couples differ not only from white heterosexual couples but also from same-race nonwhite ones. Interraciality magnifies and overdetermines heterosexual interpretations of male-female interactions. As a result of the intense sexualization of the color line, all kinds of cross-racial male-female interactions are presumed to be sexual. Heterosexual interracial couples are thus hypervisible, while same-sex desire across racial lines is frequently invisible and culturally illegible. Yet even as cross-race male-female relationships are incessantly read as heterosexual, they are not heteronormative and have not been accorded the full privileges of heterosexuality.
While we know, thanks to the work of Siobhan Somerville, that race played an important role in shaping cultural conceptions of the emerging category of homosexuality, scholars have paid less attention to how race has worked to construct the boundaries of what constituted “proper” heterosexuality.7 Yet for much of US history, cross-race different-sex relationships have been as “queer” in their challenge to heterosexuality as homosexuality has. Heterosexual interracial relationships have historically threatened notions of white racial purity. They have challenged a social and national order constructed to maintain white supremacy and white male patriarchal privilege. Stigmatized as illicit and deviant, they served as an “other” against which the heterosexual norm could define itself. In many ways, different-sex interracial couples, especially those involving a white woman, have proved as much of, or even more of, a threat to the heteronormative social order as same-sex couples have.
Reproduction
Without the regulation of different-sex interracial relationships, it would have been nearly impossible to build a race-based society where privileges and opportunities were granted based on a racial hierarchy. Colonial and later state prohibitions against different-sex interracial relationships helped construct and define racial boundaries and categories and in particular allowed for the imagining of whiteness as a space of racial “purity,” uncontaminated by the taint of “blood” of racial groups that were rapidly being defined in opposition to whiteness. If European settlers to the Americas had freely mixed with both the indigenous people and the Africans imported as laborers, race as we know it today may not have ever developed. But the colonies and later states chose a different course, passing laws that had two major functions: to create a sharp division, especially between those considered white and those of African descent; and to ensure that race would correspond first with slave status and later with privilege.8
The web of antimiscegenation laws that marked the American landscape in some form or another for over three hundred years (from the passage of the first law targeting interracial sex in Maryland in 1661 to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia that declared all remaining state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional) sought to create and protect a mythic “pure” whiteness from the contamination of interracial mixing.9 Virginia’s 1662 law decreed that “any Christian” who fornicated with a black man or woman would have to pay double the fines typically incurred for such an act. That law also announced a profound break with English common law because it ruled that a child’s legal status would follow from that of its mother rather than its father. The law laid out the reasons for the change quite clearly. “Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”10 White men, in other words, could have sex with enslaved women, and any resulting children would inherit their mother’s slave status. But mixed-race children of white women would be born free. Thus, all interracial relationships between white women and black men potentially threatened the system of racial slavery, as well as the authority of white men.
These regulations and social customs helped create the astounding racial fiction that mixed-race children born to white women would “pollute” the white race, while those born to women of color would not affect whiteness, as long as the white father did not try to legitimate them through marriage or some other legal means. The greater policing of white women’s reproductive capacities reflected a patriarchal perspective on heterosexual sex: men were the active partners, who through the sex act transferred their semen—and metaphorically their blood—to women. But the passive female partners did not have the same potential to pollute men. Thus, a white man “injected” his white blood into nonwhite races when he had sex with a woman of color. But a white woman was polluted and tainted by nonwhite blood if she had sex with a man of color. The segregationist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo starkly acknowledged this gendered construction of interracial sex in a 1947 screed against integration. “We deplore the conditions which have poured a broad stream of white blood into black veins,” Bilbo wrote, “but we deny that any appreciable amount of black blood has entered white veins. As disgraceful as the sins of some white men may have been, they have not in any way impaired the purity of the Southern Caucasian blood.”
