Posner's Race Against Race

Richard Posner of The New Republic has published a discussion of miscegenation/mixed race marriages entitled The Race Against Race. He mixes into his writing a review of two works, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe and Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell by Paul A. Lombardo. It is a general overview of mixed race marriages from a legal and social perspective.

Still another puzzle is why aversion to “mixed marriages” (not limited to racially mixed marriages) should lead to the enactment and the enforcement of laws against them. Orthodox Jews strongly oppose marriage to gentiles, and even Reform rabbis are generally unwilling to perform such marriages. Most parents do not want their children to marry people from a lower social class. And while black-white marriages remain rare, marriages between whites and Asians have become common. In part this is because there is a distinctive black culture in the United States (though not all blacks are part of that culture) but not a distinctive Asian one after the first generation; and in part it is because there is more prejudice against blacks than against Asians, or for that matter against Jews, Irish, and Italians. But it hardly seems necessary to have laws against mixed marriages, to which people are already averse. The aversion would make such marriages rare in any event, so why have laws against them with all the attendant bother for courts and marriage-license bureaus?

Trying to answer this question is, to say the least, a daunting task. One might instead, dissect race and status according to its different contexts (there are not universal perceptions of race, and every group is subject to different social environments). For example, in colonial Latin America people of mixed European and indigenous backgrounds were in a social stratum of their own; they became the clerks and assistants to the region’s colonial rulers. Their status was higher than that of the pure indigenous population, but they could never enter the exclusive social circles of the European elite. This context is very different than that of the mixed children of black slaves and white masters the author describes as pariahs of sorts.