About this Book

After decades of struggle to promote racial equality and ensure personal freedom, interracial intimacy remains one of the least understood areas of race relations in the United States. Few people realize that as late as the 1960s state legislatures were free to punish individuals who either had sec with or married persons outside their racial and ethnic groups. The first history of the legal regulation of interracial relationships, Rachel R. Moran's groundbreaking book also grapples with the consequences of that history.

Crossing disciplinary lines, Moran looks in depth at interracial intimacy in America from colonial times to the present. She traces the evolution of bans on intermarriage and explains why blacks and Asians faced harsh penalties while Native Americans and Latinos did not. She provides fresh insight into how these laws served complex purposes, why they remained on the books for so long, and what led to their eventual demise. As Moran demonstrates, the United States Supreme Court could not declare statutes barring intermarriage unconstitutional until the civil rights movement, coupled with the sexual revolution, has transformed prevailing views about race, sex, and marriage.

Although the Supreme Court established a principle of color blindness in the regulation of intimacy when it struck down bans on intermarriage, centuries of segregation in sex, marriage, and family life are not easily undone. Today high rates of same-race marriage persist, adoption across the color line generates intese controversy, and census takers struggle to classify multiracial citizens. With candor and compassion, Moran confronts such emerging issues in her account of the ongoing struggle to make freedom and equality a reality in private life. Interracial Intimacy--with its exploration of the complicated interplay of race and romance, the challenge of forging family ties across the color line, and the gowing visibility of multiracial Americans--reveals that even today, interracial relationships remain fragile arrangements poised between a history of pervasive segregation and a hope of personal transcendence.