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It was not just white racial purity that heterosexuality threatened; its new “pleasure-centered dispersal of sexual energy” had within it the seeds “of the fall of the white state,” Stokes concludes, a possibility brought to the screen in the famous 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith.20 Birth of Nation dramatized Griffith’s version of the history of Reconstruction, as the South sought to rebuild after the Civil War. In Griffith’s version, based loosely on Thomas Dixon’s novels The Klansman and The Leopard’s Spots, the threat to white southerners was both the mentally and socially inferior freed blacks who no longer accepted their rightful place as subordinate to whites and the northern whites who falsely believed that blacks could ever be equal to whites. The political drama focuses on the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and its efforts to restore white supremacy in the South, but its romantic drama focuses on two heterosexual couples, each involving one child of the pro-Union white northern Stoneman family and one child of the pro-Confederacy white southern Cameron family. For the Stoneman-Cameron couples to achieve their happy ending, the white northern partners must both come to recognize the threat that blacks present to the social order and to realize the danger posed by interracial relationships. Here the most conniving blacks are those who are racially mixed themselves, and what black men really want as the symbol of their newfound freedom is a white wife. In Birth of a Nation, interracial sex threatens not only white racial purity—indeed, the character presented as the paragon of white female purity, a teenager known only as “Little Sister,” jumps to her death rather than face defilement at the hands of a black man—but also the fledging post–Civil War national order. The white northerners can only be happily united in matrimony with their white southern lovers when they realize how threatening black political, social, and sexual equality really is. As one of the intertitle cards in a climactic scene near the end of the silent film reads, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.”21 Birthing a nation, the film makes quite clear, required promoting certain kinds of relationships while prohibiting others.

Heterosexuality is not simply the sexual desires and practices that are socially defined as “normal.” Rather, as Stevi Jackson writes, “the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality derives from its institutionalization as more than merely a sexual relation.”22 Heterosexuality is institutionalized through laws and public policy that privilege certain kinds of relationships and familial arrangements over others. Government policies that promote marriage, that encourage male-headed households, that link government benefits to one’s marital status, and that view marriage and family creation as a solution to poverty or juvenile delinquency have all worked to portray the ideal citizen as heterosexual. As Joane Nagel explains in her work on the intersections of race, sexuality, and ethnicity, “Implicit in the idea of the nation . . . are certain prescriptions and proscriptions for sexual crossings—what good citizens should and should not do sexually, and whom they should and should not have sex with.”23 Gender plays a vital role in this nation building, with women given responsibility for reproducing the nation and men for running and defending it. As a result, nationalist politics goes “hand-in-hand” with forms of “hegemonic masculinity” that promote and affirm a patriarchal, heteronormative social order that justifies monitoring and controlling women’s sexuality. Nationalist discourse across the globe, Nagel concludes, defines “proper places for men and women,” “valorize[s] the heterosexual family as the bedrock of the nation,” and condemns “those considered outside the sexual boundaries of the nation.”24

Peggy Pascoe’s sweeping history of the United States’ antimiscegenation regime highlights just how much energy has been expended to place heterosexual cross-race relationships outside the “sexual boundaries of the nation.” Legislation regulating interracial relationships were among the first racial laws passed in the colonies, and they were the last segregation laws to fall in the civil rights era. Antimiscegenation laws, which existed in some form from 1661 to 1967, proved the most pervasive and enduring forms of legal racial discrimination. The antimiscegenation regime, Pascoe reminds us, was a national one, not just a southern one. Laws prohibiting interracial marriage existed in all but nine of the fifty states at one time or another. They targeted relationships not only between blacks and whites but also between whites and Asians, Malays, and, in some cases, Native Americans. Antimiscegenation laws thus grouped together all nonwhites as a threat to white purity and made clear that preventing interracial marriage was a vital part of constructing a system of white supremacy and building a stable nation.25

The sexuality scholar Steven Seidman insists that critical sexuality studies must focus more attention on “analyzing the way in which regimes of normative heterosexuality create hegemonic and subordinate forms of heterosexuality.”26 If so, then exploring the antimiscegenation regime needs to be at the top of the priority list. The widespread and intense regulation of interracial relationships suggests that different-sex cross-race relationships were among the most deviant forms of heterosexuality, viewed by authorities as highly threatening to the state. Institutionalized heterosexuality typically promotes monogamous, marital relationships, with marriage being so important to the state that long-term cohabiting different-sex couples are presumed to be part of a “common-law marriage” even when they have made no legal contract with each other. But in the case of interracial pairings, marriage actually made a relationship more threatening to the state, not less. Interracial marriages had to be regulated in order to prevent the transfer of wealth and assets from whites to nonwhites. They needed to be prohibited to ensure that any children born of interracial sex would be considered illegitimate. And they needed to be stigmatized as a way to promote a construction of a stable national order where whites held a privileged place.

Indeed, the regulation of interracial marriage was so important to states that even white men would find their rights limited. While the regulation of interracial sex sought to control the actions of white women while allowing white men to freely engage in sex with nonwhite women, the prohibition of interracial marriage affected both men and women alike. While Pascoe notes that this impingement on the rights of white men was among the “hardest won—and most unstable—achievement” of the antimiscegenation regime, the fact that patriarchal privilege did not extend to white men’s rights to legitimize their mixed-race children or to leave their assets to their nonwhite partners demonstrates that interraciality could, to put it crudely, trump heterosexuality.27 Courts regularly denied nonwhite long-term partners of white men the status of common-law wives, which would have granted them the right to their partner’s estates and legitimacy for their children. Many of the miscegenation cases that reached the courts concerned the disposition of property or estates after the death of a white spouse. Some states designed laws specifically to prevent this kind of wealth transmission. Mississippi law awarded inheritances to any white descendant, regardless of legitimacy and no matter how remote, over any mixed-race descendant.28

Yet while the antimiscegenation regime placed some limits on white men’s freedom for the sake of the nation, it was white women who had the power to truly disrupt the national order through engaging in interracial relationships. Women, perceived as the guardians of the purity of their communities, have been charged with reproducing and upholding the identity of racial nations. As the legal scholar Leti Volpp argues, “Nationalism entwines with race so that women are subjected to control in order to achieve the aim of a national racial purity.”29 White women who explicitly chose nonwhite men challenged not only the white men in their own lives but also the entire edifice of a racial system justified by the need to defend white women’s racial purity. White men defended segregation, the denial of political equality, and the practice of lynching on the grounds that they needed to protect precious white womanhood from nonwhites, and especially black men, who might come to see themselves as equal to whites if not confined to a subordinate racial status.30 It is no wonder that white women who became involved in interracial relationships were frequently portrayed as mentally ill and even institutionalized by their parents.31 “But would you want your daughter to marry one?” the famous “final” question, invoked as late as the 1960s as a way to silence critiques of segregation, made clear the ways in which interracial relationship between white and nonwhite men directly threatened white male patriarchal authority. “A Negro having relations with a white man’s daughter, his own precious virgin, is in effect a storming of the castle, the penultimate act of castration,” a 1966 magazine article colorfully explained.32

And what is castration but the ultimate denial of patriarchal power? While feminist scholarship tells us that heterosexuality has served as an institution of male control over women, interracial heterosexuality instead threatened white male patriarchal control over white women. In a seminal 1980 essay, Adrienne Rich argued that women’s emotional, economic, and physical bonds with each other represented the most powerful threat to compulsory heterosexuality and male control over women. But white men’s response to the possibility of relationships between white women and nonwhite men suggests that heterosexual interraciality could be as threatening to patriarchal power as lesbianism was.33 Interraciality, like same-sex relationships, challenged the stability of a heterosexual national order.

While nonwhites have not had an equal place to whites in the nation, they have at least had the possibility of inclusion if they adhered to heteronormative conventions through same-race marriages and nuclear family formation. Indeed, understanding how “regimes of normative heterosexuality create hegemonic and subordinate forms of heterosexuality” requires that we also explore how blacks, Asians, and other racialized communities viewed cross-racial relationships. Communities of color participated in the construction of a heteronormative order that stigmatized interracial relationships even if their full inclusion in that order remained elusive. That has been the case whether they have sought to further themselves on the basis of their similarity to white Americans or whether they have sought power and purchase in the nation on the basis of their differences from whites.

For racialized groups stigmatized as sexually deviant and licentious, embracing the respectability politics associated with heteronormativity—monogamy, marriage, and middle-class cultural practices—has long served as one path toward racial equality. Both blacks and Asian Americans, for example, promoted images of their own family life as “normal” in order to further their claims for cultural and political inclusion. As Judy Wu has argued, the experience of being defined as sexually deviant as a result of racial discrimination “reinforces the value of heteronormativity” for nonwhite groups.34 Of course, since the entire antimiscegenation regime marked nonwhites as inferior to whites, people of color did not necessarily support or advocate bars on intermarriage themselves. Indeed, they feared that such bans would only serve to make it easier for white men to sexually exploit women of color. But, like whites, many associated interracial relationships with exploitative and illicit sex, characterized those who would engage in such relationships as degraded, and feared that open involvement in or support for such relationships would tarnish the entire community as lacking in respectability. In 1868, all eight of the black delegates to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention joined white delegates in voting to condemn “all amalgamation . . . legitimate or illegitimate.”35 Black club women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted “ladylike” behavior and sexual self-control as a way for black women to challenge the “myth of black promiscuity,” a myth fueled by even consensual interracial relationships.36 The impulse to associate interracial relationships with immorality and to condemn them as detrimental to the race continued well into the twentieth century. “All decent colored people disapprove of mixed marriages,” a self-described “Loyal American Negro Mother” wrote in 1949, while the black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr. found in their 1945 study of black Chicago that having a white spouse could hurt blacks’ social position with other blacks.37 Blacks or other racial groups who sought to normalize their racial difference by publicly performing heteronormativity tended to be wary of cross-racial relationships.38

This common ground between whites and nonwhites again highlights the deviant nature of heterosexual interracial relationships. These relationships have been sexualized to the extent that respectability politics has proven a limited avenue for advancement for interracial couples. The antimiscegenation legal regime had the effect of stigmatizing all kinds of interracial relationships as immoral and licentious even if the relationship was stable, long term, monogamous, or resulted in a marriage.39 Marriage, in other words, did not normalize heterosexual interraciality; it did not confer respectability on an interracial couple as long as there were laws barring intermarriage. Even in states where intermarriage was legal, white women with black men and black women with white men were presumed to be prostitutes, not wives. Elaine Neil, a white woman, had to threaten to sue the state of New York in the early 1950s to stop a police campaign against her and her black husband. Police arrested Elaine on prostitution charges, called her a “whore,” and questioned the legitimacy of her marriage to her black husband. Nor did marriage protect couples from speculation that their relationships were motivated by sexual curiosity, mental instability, or economic gain.40

That is not to say that heterosexual interracial couples have not engaged in a politics of respectability. Indeed, cross-race couples have sought to distance themselves from negative stereotypes of illicit interracial sex by stressing exactly the kinds of behaviors that heteronormativity requires: that they married for love, that they are no different from same-race heterosexual couples, that they are stable and monogamous, and that they have children and form nuclear families. But this project has been, at best, incomplete. The 1951 intermarried couple who insisted to Ebony magazine that they were ordinary people, “nothing spectacular nor side show freaks,” differed little in perspective from couples in the 1980s who railed against the negative portrayal of interracial relationships on television talk shows from current couples who feel they must constantly work to deflect negative stereotypes and to position themselves as normal, legitimate, and “in love.”41 Normalizing heterosexual interracial love through a politics of respectability remains an elusive strategy for full acceptance because it is not the status of an interracial relationship—commercial or not, married or not, stable or not—that makes it deviant. It is the fact of the relationship at all. As with queer couples, heterosexual interracial couples have had to fight to be considered respectable because their object choice automatically renders their relationship nonnormative.

It is not only respectability that has eluded interracial couples but also the possibility of participating in a politics of nation building. Interracial relationships not only have threatened the construction of a white heteronormative state but also have been viewed with disgust by other racial groups who envisioned constructing a sense of nationhood based on their ethnic or racial heritage. The preeminent black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, the head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, went so far as to praise the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan in 1922 because that organization, like his, believed in racial purity. Garvey and the Klan shared similar antimiscegenation views. “Whilst the Ku Klux Klan desires to make America absolutely a white man’s country, the Universal Negro Improvement Association wants to make Africa absolutely a black man’s country,” Garvey explained. Interraciality threatened both of these nation-building projects.42 In the 1960s and 1970s, black nationalists attacked blacks who intermarried for betraying the race and “sleeping with the enemy.” Malcolm X echoed Garvey in his opposition to intermarriage. “Let the white man keep his women and let us keep ours,” he instructed blacks. Black nationalists described interracial relationships, in the words of Eldridge Cleaver, as a “revolutionary sickness,” a sign of one’s desire to be white. Building a strong black nation required, as one black woman explained, that blacks eschew interracial relationships and “want to see the blood of our heritage running in and through the veins of our children.”43 There is no space for interraciality in racial nationalism, whether espoused by whites or by other racialized groups.

Although there have always been a handful of Americans who have praised racial mixing as a way to fulfill the United States’ destiny, it has proven difficult for interracial couples to imagine themselves as engaged in their own political project. The historian Greg Carter, who writes about the understudied intellectual American tradition of viewing racial mixing as a positive good rather than a threat or sign of degradation, shows how advocating racial mixing could be part of a vision of full equality for all races in a transformed country.44 Thus, the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips urged people of all races to mix freely in the United States, while more recently, groups created by and for mixed-race couples and families have sometimes described interracial love as one avenue toward reducing racial tensions. As one magazine for interracial couples insisted in 1977, “Love is the answer, not legislation.”45 But whatever nation-building project interracial couples and their families might be involved in has always been viewed as utopian, as even the title of Carter’s book—The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Race Mixing—suggests.

Interracial couples, moreover, have found that their relationships are stigmatized and discredited if there is even the slightest hint that their actions are politically motivated. While same-race heterosexual couples can be part of a nation-building project—even an explicit one—and not have the status and legitimacy of their relationship called into question, interracial couples have been much more easily charged with being together for reasons that heterosexuality deems illegitimate, such as marrying to promote a political agenda. Not surprisingly, different-sex interracial couples have historically taken great pains to insist that their marriages are respectable, traditional, and loving.46 The earliest clubs for interracial couples, the Manasseh Society, which was founded in Milwaukee and Chicago in the late nineteenth century, and the Penguin Club, founded in New York in 1936, explicitly required that all members be legally married and even demanded proof of character. The Manasseh Society required that members attend church regularly; the Penguin Society forbid childless couples on the ground that the presence of children indicated a more stable marriage.47 Being seen as “crusaders” for interracial love served to reinforce negative stereotypes about these relationships in ways that placed them even further outside heteronormativity. For same-race couples, building stable nuclear families has been considered a key aspect of nation building, but cross-race couples have found little place for themselves in that project.