Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation and Race: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [A Tribute]

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 1-5
E-ISSN: 1536-0334, Print ISSN: 0160-9009

Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

The following papers pay tribute to Peggy Pascoe’s [1954-2010] extraordinary book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. They originated at a session held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January 2010 to explore the implications of Pascoe’s work for current histories of race and gender. Sitting in the audience, I enjoyed not only the roundtable but also the deep pleasure evident on Pascoe’s face as she listened to the presentations and to the discussion of the influence of her book on our scholarship and our teaching. Peggy Pascoe always makes us think harder, in her gentle and affirming ways. This session gave her a taste of the rewards sown by her latest scholarly achievement. I could sense that day that I shared with others in attendance a sense of pride and vicarious gratification that so treasured a colleague should be recognized in this way.

Both sweeping and detailed, What Comes Naturally constructs the dual histories of the criminalization of interracial marriage and the resistance to that process by individuals and social movements, spanning the century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Since its publication in 2009 the book has been widely honored. It has received both the Hawley Prize and the Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, both the Dunning and the Kelly Prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. The range of subjects covered by these awards is telling: economy, politics, or institutions; cultural history; women’s history or feminist theory; American history; sociolegal history. In short, this is a book that has already had a profound effect on the profession across its many specializations…

Articles

Legal Fictions Exposed
pages 6-14

Eileen Boris, Eileen Boris Hull Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law
pages 15-21

Jacki Thompson Rand, Associate Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

“The Relics of Slavery”: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South
pages 22-30

Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Nikki Sawada Bridges Flynn and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 31-40

Valerie J. Matsumoto, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Therapeutic Culture and Marriage Equality: What Comes Naturally and Contemporary Dialogues about Marriage
pages 41-48

Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
City University of New York, Queens College

Social Movements, the Rise of Colorblind Conservativism, and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 49-59

Matt Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

Perspectives on History
November 2010

Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

Scholar of gender, race, and the U.S. West; 2009 winner of AHA’s William H. Dunning Prize and Joan Kelly Prize

Peggy Pascoe, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon, died at home in Eugene, Oregon, on July 23, 2010. She leaves behind an exceptional professional legacy, not only in her prize-winning scholarship on women and multicultural relations in the West, but also through the careers of the students and colleagues she mentored over the decades…

Pascoe was part way through the manuscript for her book on miscegenation law when she learned in 2005 that she had ovarian cancer. Initially she did not think that she would be able to complete the study. In 2007, at a panel held in her honor at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, several colleagues commented on her draft chapters, which helped inspire her to go back to work on the book even as she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. The scholarly result was stunning. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2009) provides a sweeping and detailed account of the criminalization of interracial marriage and resistance to that process from the 1860s through the 1960s. It is also a superb history of the shifting meaning of “race” in American culture and the ways that gender and race are always mutually constructed. One of the most acclaimed books in U.S. social, cultural, and legal history, it received the Ellis W. Hawley and the Lawrence W. Levine Prizes from the Organization of American Historians; the John H. Dunning Prize and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association…

Read the entire article here.

The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage

History News Network
2009-02-23

Peggy Pascoe, Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon

Peggy Pascoe is the author of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”, (winner of 5 literary prizes).

The election (and now the inauguration) of Barack Obama has inspired a widespread sense of awe at the scope and scale of change in race relations in America—and more than a hint of self-congratulation.

The news media just can’t seem to resist trumpeting the example of interracial marriage. When Barack Obama’s white mother married his black father in 1961, reporters remind us, their marriage would have been illegal in more than a dozen states. See how far we’ve come, they enthuse, falling into the trap of assuming that the legality of interracial marriage is proof that racism and white supremacy have disappeared into thin air and a colorblind utopia is on the way.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades studying the history of interracial marriage in America, I want to suggest that at a moment when talk of change seems to be everywhere, we could use a bit less celebration—and a lot more reflection…

…It does not, however, follow that interracial marriage is synonymous with colorblindness or that the end of racism is at hand. Generations of lawyers had to fight to make interracial marriage a legal right. Many of them thought colorblindness was a wonderful idea, but few were naive enough to believe it actually existed. Today the assertion that America is a colorblind nation is so commonplace that even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices are eager to wrap themselves in its mantle. Yet forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, marriages between blacks and whites are still the rarest form of interracial marriage, and interracial couples still face a host of challenges, from stares on the street to confusion on the faces of their children’s teachers and playmates. And in yet another example of racism’s shape-shifting power, America’s prisons, police, schools, and housing markets offer daily evidence of how easy it is for claims of colorblindness to co-exist with, and even enable, new forms of white entitlement…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

Legal History Blog
2010-06-03

Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science
University of Southern California

Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, Department of History, has won the Willard Hurst Prize for 2010 from the Law and Society Association for her new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press). Here’s the Prize Committee’s citation:

What Comes Naturally is a comprehensive, interesting, and important sociolegal history that takes us through the history of miscegenation law beyond its commonly accepted geography. It analyzes how by “naturalizing” miscegenation law, politics, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge came together to sustain a set of legal parameters that eventually became policy in the post Civil War world throughout the United States, enhancing and expanding the Black/White race dichotomy, while complicating it in gendered terms. The book is an outstanding contribution richly nuanced and insightful. It expands our understanding of conceptions of race, not only in the South, but elsewhere. It contains as well a superb elucidation of the role that gender played in the process of defining and elaborating on miscegenation…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama’s rise marks America’s first multiracial decade

Yahoo News
2009-12-09

Thomas Kelley

Everyone has a day of awakening when it comes to race. For me, it was a cool September day when I was eight years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado from Tennessee and like any child starting a new school, I was nervous. In the administrator’s office, my mother and I waited to go over my files. Nearby was another family—a white mother and a black father with their son and daughter. They were also arriving for their first day and the boy was around my age.

To my surprise, my mother turned to me and quietly told me she was worried for the children. We were living in a predominantly white suburb and she later explained to me that being black in our society was hard enough, but being half black, half white, was even harder. There was greater potential for rejection from both sides of the racial divide. Because of this, she wondered if entering a black-white relationship was always fair to the kids. In some ways, I understood my mother’s reservations, but I was also astonished. The simple reason why is because I’m biracial too, half Asian and half white.

That was more than 25 years ago. Today, the multiracial American has become an undeniable fact of life in the 21st century. From the actress Jessica Alba to the trend-scriber Malcolm Gladwell to the Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, many multiracial Americans have reached superstar status in the last decade. And the biggest phenomenon of them all is President Barack Obama.

This isn’t a new story…

…“I think that President Obama has been trying, with really remarkable skill, to get Americans to begin to think of the United States as a fundamentally multiracial society,” historian Peggy Pascoe says. “And that strikes me as a really important move, partly because it will help dismantle the long history of white supremacy in the United States but also because it will help the United States fit more comfortably in the global world and the 21st century.”…

…For many activists and scholars, racial statistics still present a quandary of sorts. Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multiracial herself and has written extensively on multiracial issues, acknowledges the 2000 and 2010 Census changes as a key advance. But she also argues for a stand-alone multiracial category and the eventual abolition of “race” itself. She argues that race is not a biological category but a concept, something that the Census acknowledges in its own briefs.

Read the entire article here.

The Race Against Race [Book review of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”]

The New Republic
2010-01-29

Richard Posner

“What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America” by Peggy Pascoe
“Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell” by Paul A. Lombardo

Peggy Pascoe, a historian, has written what might seem to be an uncannily timely history of laws against miscegenation—interracial marriage or procreation—in the United States. In 2008, after all, the nation elected its first president who had parents of different races. A nice coincidence for Pascoe, but not much more. Presidential candidates with an unusual background are elected only when their background has ceased to be problematic: the first Catholic when people stopped worrying that a Catholic president would be the Pope’s puppet; the first divorced person when divorce had become too common to be stigmatized; and now the first person of mixed race, when “miscegenation” has ceased to have any public significance and indeed has vanished from most people’s vocabulary. Black-white marriages remain rare, and many parents of whites do not want their children to marry blacks, and vice versa—but such aversions raise only personal issues, not social or political ones. So Pascoe’s book will tell us nothing about Obama’s presidency, but it is a good book that recounts a fascinating history and bears at least obliquely on one contemporary political issue—that of gay marriage.

Laws against mixed marriage have been surprisingly rare outside the United States. Nazi Germany forbade marriage between a German and any member of a non-Aryan “race,” thus including Jews, along with blacks, Slavs, and members of a host of other racial and nonracial groups. And South Africa in the apartheid era forbade interracial marriage. Because the regulation of marriage was considered a state rather than a federal prerogative, there was never a nationwide ban on mixed marriage in the United States.

The American laws forbidding black-white marriage date to colonial times. They were found in northern as well as southern colonies and states. But they had little significance in the North because there were not many blacks, as there were in the South, where the laws reflected and ratified the inferior status of blacks. Not all Southern blacks were slaves, but not even free blacks had the rights of citizens. Oddly, in light of the later eugenic concern with interracial procreation, the taboo against interracial marriage coexisted with a high rate of procreative sexual intercourse between white men and black women (condoned by the authorities despite laws against non-marital sex), combined with a fierce determination to prevent sex between black men and white women. This odd pattern made a certain economic sense. It increased the range of sexual opportunities for white men, and since the child of a black slave woman was a slave, the children of such relationships were not an economic burden. White men retained a monopoly of white women, while black men had to share black women with white men. White men dominated government, so it is not surprising that the laws were formulated and enforced in such a way as to maximize their sexual freedom, although they could not marry black women…

Read the entire article here.

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
2009-03-23
pp. 218-220

Mark Kessler, Chair of the Department of History & Government and Professor of Government
Texas Woman’s Univeristy

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638)

In this highly original and important book, Peggy Pascoe describes and analyzes three centuries of laws in the United States prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual relations. In perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic study of legal marriage and sex prohibitions to date, Pascoe argues that these laws were central ideological tools used in constituting and reproducing white supremacy in the United States. Placing her study in its broadest context, she argues that examining the rise and decline of these laws “provides a locus for studying the history of race in America” (p.2). Pascoe’s study demonstrates how historical research, combined with critical cultural theory and analysis, may shed new light on significant questions regarding the power of law and legal interpretation in constructing and reconstructing social reality.

Throughout this work, the writing is admirably accessible, while the analyses and arguments are deeply nuanced. Pascoe begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in characteristics of participants, laws, and regions of the country in which the cases arose, and to help address the broader questions of nation-building and nation-formation that emerge from this study. Pascoe uses these very human stories, along with landmark appellate court decisions and local legal practices, to explore the many and varied ways in which social and political relations based on race, gender, and sexuality illuminate the rise and fall of miscegenation law in the United States.

Pascoe’s narrative begins in the Reconstruction era, when the term “miscegenation” was first invented and applied to interracial marriage and sex. Her discussion focuses on the ways in which judges, legislators, and lawyers employed notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in conventional cultural discourses about sex, gender, and sexuality to create and apply laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. Such laws emerged first in the South and North and typically applied exclusively to relations between those categorized racially as “white” and as “black.”…

Read the entire review here.

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10, 08:30-10:30 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom D (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

Chair:
Eileen Boris, Professor of History, Chair and Professor of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Commentator:
Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair and Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Sponsored by the AHA Working Group for Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

Panel Discussion
Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
Queens College, City University of New York

For the past several decades, historians have argued effectively that far from being stable and unchanging until the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, marriage–as a legal and social institution–has changed in significant ways over the course of American history.  Pascoe’s book reminds us that race must necessarily be integrated into this discourse, contending not only that who has had access to marriage has varied but also that the state has played a crucial role in the creation of marital “norms.”

Panel Discussion
Matt J. Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

Panel Discussion
Valerie Matsumoto, Associate Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Peggy Pascoe‘s landmark work raises questions regarding post-World War II changes not only in the dominant US society but also within East Asian American communities, which had their own strong preferences for endogamous marriage.  Her research also draws attention to the roles played by Asian Americans in confronting old racial structures, as embedded in law.  Challenges to miscegenation laws in the US West were mounted by Nisei such as Noriko Sawada Bridges and Harry Oyama during the critical period of Japanese American community reconfiguration and rebuilding after World War II. I will consider how the Japanese American community’s understandings of racialization shifted in this era; I will also examine perceptions of interracial marriage within the ethnic community.

Panel Discussion
Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

I suggest that the implications of Peggy Pascoe‘s work on miscegenation laws stretch beyond the geographical setting of the West, and the temporal setting of the Progressive era, and signal key points of inquiry among scholars of African American Women’s history writ large. In particular, I focus on laws of slavery and manumission in 18th and 19th centuries.  Laws governing manumission held particular ramifications for enslaved African American women as they used their consensual and non-consensual relationships with owners, and consensual relationships with free black men to access freedom for themselves and their children.  I suggest that laws governing manumission served as precursors to miscegenation laws in the 20th century. Likewise, I suggest that “marriage” and uplift constituted a range of definitions based on the particular angle of vision of African American women in both slavery and in freedom.