Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

by Renee Christine Romano

Overview

Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674042889
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	382
File size:	570 KB

Table of Contents

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Prologue: Explaining a Taboo 1 The Unintended Consequences of War 2 The Dangers of “Race Mixing” 3 Ambivalent Acceptance 4 Not Just Commies and Beatniks 5 Culture Wars and Schoolhouse Doors 6 The Rights Revolutions and Interracial Marriage 7 Talking Black and Sleeping White 8 Eroded but Not Erased Epilogue: Is Love the Answer? Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

This historical study, at once galling and hopeful, allows the reader entrée into the lives of people whose marital union is at once a sign of hope and a sign of contradiction...This book is a fine historical overview of a painful human reality.
— Paul J. Fitzgerald

INTAMS

It is this fear of 'miscegenation,' 'mongrelization,' and the threat posed by allegedly hyper-sexualized 'big black bucks' that makes up the central conflict in Renee Romano's wonderful book, Race Mixing. Romano explores the post-World War II history of interracial marriage, focusing on unions between blacks and whites in the United States. Romano has probed this most vilified of social phenomena in clear, well-written prose and her book is a welcome addition to postwar American social history, and to the burgeoning literature on race, civil rights, ethnicity, gender, and sex (the act as well as the chromosomal configuration). Romano skillfully takes a different focus in each chapter, covering a range of thematic issues while at the same time maintaining a chronological drive that gives the book momentum...It is history at its finest.
— Derek Catsam

H-Net

Romano's engaging and readable account of changes in Romano's engaging and readable account of changes in black-white marriage draws on a number of resources besides legislation and court decisions, including social science literature, magazine articles and biographical accounts…Romano is to be commended for tracing with equal care the evolution of black and white opinions about interracial marriage and gender differences within each group.
— Rachel Moran

Journal of American History

Throughout her cogent and extremely readable history of interracial love and marriage since 1940 – which begins at a period, still well within living memory, when such relationships remained illegal in much of America - Romano consistently avoids straightforward liberal triumphalism and remains admirably tentative about drawing sweeping conclusions from her data…Astute and well-judged, Race Mixing is a welcome addition to the study of interracial love in American history, which both offers new information and a new approach. Of particular value is Romano's insistence that even the apparent sweetness of love…is neither apolitical nor "free" but suffused with the race matters that remain paramount to American formations of identity and culture. Race Mixing offers a timely reminder of how far America and the Western world have traveled, and how far they still have to go.
— Andrew Warnes

African-American Review

Romano has written a thorough and fascinating study of the U.S.'s legendary obsession with interracial marriage and sex.
— W. Glasker

Choice

Renee C. Romano's fine study, Race Mixing, describes how the last 60 years brought us to current attitudes toward mixed-race relationships, which are, at best, increasingly tolerant but still fraught with ignorance and stereotype...She focuses her copious research on places where race mixing is viewed with particular fear or rare favor--schools, the workplace, the military.
— Kate Manning

Los Angeles Book Review

Romano examines the deeply embedded taboo of interracial marriage in the U.S. Citing studies, surveys, court accounts, media coverage, and interviews with interracial couples, Romano explores how attitudes have evolved, eventually eroding that taboo, within the last 60 years...Romano outlines the forces that eventually led to the breakdown of the taboo, from the integration of armed services during World War II to the migration of southern blacks to the North for war-related jobs, exploring the political, cultural, and social history of black-white marriages since the 1940s. The interviews are particularly powerful in conveying the challenges of interracial marriages and the changes in social attitudes...But Romano cautions that the increase in black-white marriages does not signify the end of structural racial inequalities in American society.
— Vanessa Bush

Booklist

Romano's monograph is excellent, and I hope it will gain the large audience that it deserves.
— Randall Kennedy

The Atlantic