Miscegenation

By: Richard Newman

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Miscegenation

From the Latin words miscere (to mix) and genus (race); referred to sexual relations across racial lines and is no longer in use because of its racist implications.

The word miscegenation was coined by two Democrats during the presidential election campaign of 1864 in an attempt to embarrass and discredit Abraham Lincoln, the Republican incumbent running for reelection. In an anonymous pamphlet that appeared in December 1863 entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro, the authors played on white fears of interracial sex by pretending to issue a Republican-sponsored booklet advocating racial mixing and amalgamation. The real authors were David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a staunchly Democratic paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter.

Sex across the color line was an obsession of white America, particularly the stereotype of black men's alleged craving for white women, along with believers in Anglo-Saxon “racial” superiority who feared that “mongrelization” was degenerative. In fact, black-white sex existed from the beginning of the slave trade in the sixteenth century, virtually always on the initiative of Europeans who held Africans in their total power. During the notorious Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, for example, black women and children were allowed mobility on board ship so that white sailors could have unlimited sexual access to them.

Sex played a role in the gradual differentiation of Africans from other indentured servants in Virginia, a process that culminated around 1700 in the unique North American phenomenon of chattel slavery, by which people were legally defined as property. The very first case in this chain was a sexual one: in 1630 Hugh Davis was sentenced by the Virginia court to a whipping “for defiling his body in lying with a Negro.” Even though it was a white man who was convicted and punished for the act, the case shows the early eroticization of racial differences.

The interracial sexual pattern in the antebellum South is clear: Because slaves were property, like animals or objects, they had no rights, and all black women were sexually available to all white men. In addition, African American marriage and parenthood were not recognized in law, and there was no recourse for sexual abuse in the courts, government, church, or press. Virtually every plantation produced children of mixed race; the 1860 federal census classified 588,532 persons as mulattos. A minuscule number of white fathers recognized their children and provided for them; some parents encouraged the fairest skinned to run away and hide their racial identity by passing for white. Most mixed-blood slave children were simply worked and sold like all other slaves.

The white South combined the permissive sexual exploitation of black women by white men with a fanatic “protection” of white women from black men. In both cases, the ideology was that people of African descent were closer to nature and savagery, but the real reason was probably economic: Legally, a child was slave or free depending on the status of the mother. All white women were free and nearly all black women were slaves.

The uniqueness of chattel slavery prohibited in North America (except for New Orleans) the emergence of mulattos as a distinct third group between black and white, as existed in the West Indies, Latin America, and South Africa. American slavery was race- and color-based, but it would have become weakened ideologically and economically if it had allowed any deviation from the one-drop rule, that is the belief that any black ancestry made one black.

Miscegenation was about marriage as well as sex, since sexual relationships were legitimized by marriage. Therefore, interracial marriage was prohibited, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Pace v. Alabama (1883). That decision was not overturned until well after the modern Civil Rights Movement had begun, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), when sixteen states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Civil rights and voting rights were extended to African Americans before the right was granted both to whites and blacks to marry (and have legitimate sexual relationships) across the color line.

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