What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

"I’m a huge fan of this book because it shows how deliberately the system of white supremacy was built. What Pascoe does in What Comes Naturally is to show how laws against interracial marriage were constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century as part of establishing the Jim Crow order in the south, and then the system of white supremacy that we’re familiar with today. She does this in beautiful writing. I teach it in my 20th century survey class sometimes because I think it’s such a great example of how a historian can convey information. She uses individual cases: for example, someone, a clerk, is in charge of determining whether or not somebody is white. She really takes us through how these laws were implemented and challenged in all regions of the United States. Before bans on interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which made it legal to marry across racial lines, a majority of people polled objected to marriages that crossed racial lines. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Pascoe shows that by ten years after Loving, people surveyed supported such marriages and forgot they ever opposed them. What we see is that people who had strongly supported the entrenched system of white supremacy could completely change their social beliefs. This evidence speaks to something that is hard to comprehend about our current moment, which is: what happened to overt racism between the civil rights movement’s successes and the new emergence of racism in this moment? That was one of the fundamental questions I was looking to address in my book. In any system of white supremacy, there’s a hyper-focus on the production of white babies, so it becomes really important to regulate white women’s sexuality. But in American history , men haven’t been regulated in the same way. For a white man to have an interracial child has been, at various moments, part of terroristic violence against communities of color or profitable, when enslaved women are involved. So, white men’s sexual freedom wasn’t anathema in the way that it was for white women who crossed that line. Pascoe shows that couples were more heavily penalized when it was white women who were involved in interracial relationships. Those couplings were the subject of felony laws and the harshest penalties by the state. That goes to show that the interracial bans were oriented around men’s sexual freedom and women’s sexual service to the project of white supremacy. The white power movement, which is the substance of my book, is not the totality of white supremacy. My book is looking at a tiny subset of white supremacy, a tiny subset of people who hold racist beliefs and carry out racial violence in support of those beliefs. The people I write about are concerned about racial annihilation, a threat they see as coming from either the failure of white women to have a sufficient number of children or the hyper-fertility of other people. Women’s reproduction has always been deeply connected to the project of white supremacy."