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Without the regulation of different-sex interracial relationships, it would have been nearly impossible to build a race-based society where privileges and opportunities were granted based on a racial hierarchy. Colonial and later state prohibitions against different-sex interracial relationships helped construct and define racial boundaries and categories and in particular allowed for the imagining of whiteness as a space of racial “purity,” uncontaminated by the taint of “blood” of racial groups that were rapidly being defined in opposition to whiteness. If European settlers to the Americas had freely mixed with both the indigenous people and the Africans imported as laborers, race as we know it today may not have ever developed. But the colonies and later states chose a different course, passing laws that had two major functions: to create a sharp division, especially between those considered white and those of African descent; and to ensure that race would correspond first with slave status and later with privilege.8

The web of antimiscegenation laws that marked the American landscape in some form or another for over three hundred years (from the passage of the first law targeting interracial sex in Maryland in 1661 to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia that declared all remaining state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional) sought to create and protect a mythic “pure” whiteness from the contamination of interracial mixing.9 Virginia’s 1662 law decreed that “any Christian” who fornicated with a black man or woman would have to pay double the fines typically incurred for such an act. That law also announced a profound break with English common law because it ruled that a child’s legal status would follow from that of its mother rather than its father. The law laid out the reasons for the change quite clearly. “Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”10 White men, in other words, could have sex with enslaved women, and any resulting children would inherit their mother’s slave status. But mixed-race children of white women would be born free. Thus, all interracial relationships between white women and black men potentially threatened the system of racial slavery, as well as the authority of white men.

These regulations and social customs helped create the astounding racial fiction that mixed-race children born to white women would “pollute” the white race, while those born to women of color would not affect whiteness, as long as the white father did not try to legitimate them through marriage or some other legal means. The greater policing of white women’s reproductive capacities reflected a patriarchal perspective on heterosexual sex: men were the active partners, who through the sex act transferred their semen—and metaphorically their blood—to women. But the passive female partners did not have the same potential to pollute men. Thus, a white man “injected” his white blood into nonwhite races when he had sex with a woman of color. But a white woman was polluted and tainted by nonwhite blood if she had sex with a man of color. The segregationist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo starkly acknowledged this gendered construction of interracial sex in a 1947 screed against integration. “We deplore the conditions which have poured a broad stream of white blood into black veins,” Bilbo wrote, “but we deny that any appreciable amount of black blood has entered white veins. As disgraceful as the sins of some white men may have been, they have not in any way impaired the purity of the Southern Caucasian blood.”11

Bilbo reassured his readers that southern white women had “preserved the integrity of their race” so that no one could “point the finger of suspicion in any manner whatsoever at the blood which flows in the veins of white sons and daughters of the South.”12 Yet his seeming need to defend white female purity reflects the fundamental insecurity that heterosexuality causes for whiteness: even as whiteness must be reproduced to ensure a secure future for the white race, the very process of reproduction carries within it the seeds of the destruction of whiteness itself. Concepts of race are inherently linked to the body; race offers a mechanism to categorize bodies in a way that reproduces itself. Heterosexual reproduction thus operates as both the mechanism to ensure the maintenance of racial difference and the site that endangers the production of race.13

Cross-racial sex, especially that between white women and nonwhite men, had to be policed in order to construct racial categories and then later to maintain them. The late nineteenth-century emergence of heterosexuality as a sexual system only intensified fears about the dangers that different-sex interracial relationships could pose to white racial purity. Heterosexuality both placed erotic satisfaction at the core of modern sexual identity and revalued women’s sexuality in a positive way.14 As the literary scholar Mason Stokes explores, this shift to a pleasure-driven sexuality increased anxiety about racial mixing. Heterosexuality “located desire outside family, race, and nation,” Stokes argues, thus bringing with it a heightened possibility for perversion and corruption.15

Regulating interracial sex was especially crucial since the same racialized sexual stereotypes that developed as a way to differentiate nonwhites from whites could also serve to generate cross-racial desire. Even as white men insisted that black men posed a threat to white women because of their ostensibly heightened sexual appetite, their alleged lack of self-control, and their supposedly enormous penises, they worried that white women freed to explore their own sexual satisfaction might find such men appealing. Sexual racism—or ideas of racial difference articulated through constructions of sexual difference—had perhaps the unintended consequence of turning many racial “others” into attractive sexual partners; stereotypes about black men particularly threatened whiteness since they portrayed them in ways that emphasized their sexual prowess and that could, theoretically, make them attractive to white women, the guardians of white racial purity.16 The emergence of heterosexuality, Stokes thus argues, led white men to focus obsessively on the dangers of racial mixing, to engage in a “compulsive imagining of interracial sex” between black men and white women.17

Given the threat that heterosexuality posed to whiteness, it seems perhaps inevitable that Stokes finds that American literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates the importance of white male homosociality to the project of white supremacy. It was relationships between white men—who took on the project of controlling white womanhood—that served to protect whiteness, Stokes suggests. Homosocial kinship between white men was far safer for whiteness than was the heterosexual desire of men for women—or, even worse, of women for men of their choice. Even relationships between white men that blurred the line between the social and the sexual were thus less of a threat to the existing racial and social order than differently sexed interracial relationships were. As Stokes writes, in turn-of-the century American literature, “homoeroticism becomes, paradoxically, the only structure of desire that can keep whiteness white.”18 Robert Young, in his 1995 work Colonial Desire, makes the same point more explicitly. Same-sex sex, he writes, “posed no threat because it produced no children; its advantage was that it remained silent, covert, unmarked. . . . In fact, in historical terms, concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex play.”19 Heterosexual interraciality, given its ability to blur racial lines through the birth of mixed-race children, proved more threatening than homosexuality to a racial system predicated on notions of white purity.