Intermarriage

The Racial Caste System

Before the civil war, most Blacks in the United States were slaves. Although there had always been some sexual relationships between White (male) slaveowners and Black (female) slaves, White society worked diligently to make these relationships invisible. White U.S. society adopted what was called the “one-drop rule,” which meant that anyone with as much as “one drop” of non-White blood could not be considered White. By legal definition, if a White slave master made a Black slave pregnant, her child was Black (because of the “one-drop rule”) and a slave as well. Formal marriage was generally not possible between slaves (because slaves had no legal standing), and therefore formal marriage between free Whites and slaves was impossible.

One irony of the one-drop rule was that it was created to clarify racial distinctions, but the rule left White racial status always vulnerable. The discovery of some previously unknown brown or dark ancestor (or even an ancestor who was remembered by someone as dark) would rob all descendants of their Whiteness and therefore of their property and their rights.

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Interracial couple with their daughter. During the 20th century, several changes occurred that made intermarriage more acceptable and common, undermining the racial caste system of the United States. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967) overturned state laws that prohibited marriage across racial lines. Today, many interracial families live in culturally diverse neighborhoods where they find greater acceptability for interracial households.

Source: Ronnie Comeau/iStockphoto.

With the emancipation of the slaves at the end of the Civil War, White society was suddenly confronted with Blacks as legal equals, at least in theory. White elites professed a horror at the possibility of social mixing on an equal footing with Blacks, and the deepest horror was preserved for the most intimate type of mixing, intermarriage. In the 1864 presidential election, while the Civil War was still raging, proslav-ery newspaper editors in New York promulgated a hoax implying that Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists in the North were secretly hoping to marry Blacks to Whites on a mass scale. The proslavery hoax coined the term miscegenation for racial intermixing and intermarriage, and such was the fear of intermarriage that White voters in the North had largely abandoned Lincoln's reelection campaign until battlefield victories ensured his reelection.

Whites feared racial intermarriage for several reasons. First, a White person who married a Black person was throwing his or her lot in with Black society in more than just a symbolic way. Such a gesture was sure to be a blow to the social standing of the White person's family (raising questions about whether they were really White after all), so families worked diligently to ensure that their children understood that interracial marriage was taboo. Second, interracial marriage created the possibility that Black descendants could inherit property from White families. Third, 19th-century intellectual justifications for racial differences emphasized the theory that Blacks and Whites were different biological species, a theory that implied that an interracial couple could not reproduce, or that the offspring of a Black-White union would necessarily be weak of mind and body. Although there was plenty of evidence that Blacks and Whites had reproduced successfully, the informality of liaisons during slavery allowed that evidence to be overlooked.

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