by E. J. Graff
—Arapesh man to Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
Let the sharp question pierce the national heart: “Shall I or shall I not blend my Caucasian, world-ruling, world-conquering blood with the servile strain of Africa?”
—WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905)
The chief excellence of the religion of heaven consists in . . . giving to faithful servants a plurality of wives by which a numerous and faithful posterity can be raised up and taught in the principles of righteousness and truth.
—Mormon leader (1852)
The honor and faithfulness that constitutes an ideal marriage, may exist between two hundred as well as two.
—Oneida Community Handbook (1871)
The story so far: during the past 150 or 200 years, Western society has dramatically reshaped three basic pillars of marriage—money, sex, and babies. The triumph of urban capitalism over agrarian feudalism has made it possible, even mandatory, for most of us to make a living on our own—without needing the investment or approval of our parents or the assignment of a spouse as essential work partner. That economic earthquake has shaken apart the traditional “family,” releasing each of us to choose not just our jobs but also our loves. Today we each (in philosophy, if not always in practice) have the choice of when, who, or even whether we will marry, and of when, how many, or whether we will have children. These radical individual freedoms, most of which seemed sinful to our ancestors (and still do, to some) now strike society as simple justice, the necessary corollaries of Western economic reality and democratic political philosophy.
And yet despite these upheavals, money, sex, and babies are still recognizable as marriage goals. Still more revolutionary has been the almost complete overthrow of perhaps the fundamental reason for marriage: creating kin.
Westerners have heard ad nauseum about how anomalously individualistic we are. Because our reigning ethos is so individualistic, kinship sounds to many of us like a quaint or faintly oppressive reason for marriage. And so we may never be able to grasp how fully the institution of marriage has been about kinship—horizontally creating bonds with other families as well as vertically seeding new descendants. Marriage-for-kinship was politically key for early medieval clans like the Franks, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Merovingians, and Carolingians, for whom the demands of kinship were as powerful as the demands of citizenship today—and just as non-negotiable. How would you feel about your own or your brother’s marriage if it involved your town council in a NATO-like alliance with a nearby town council—committing you and your sons, siblings, uncles, and cousins to lifetime military and economic obligations? You might well rank making kin above making love.
Marriage, in other words, was long a clan project, not an individual pursuit—so long as your family had any property or status. An eighteenth-century Angiers official noted of a French widower, “since he could not have the eldest daughter, he wishes for the youngest daughter, out of his attachment to the families.” Doesn’t matter which daughter, so long as it’s the same family: It hardly sounds like the way we think of marriage today.
Of course, the idea that marriage creates kinship—not just between the couple but among their families—still lingers in our cultural rituals. What else is the wedding except a way for the families—whether family by blood or family by friendship—to work and play together in effort and celebration? Kinship is more voluntary today than it once was: today’s kin-by-marriage may never see each other after the wedding, or they may become each other’s main social circle with barbecues every weekend and a shared vacation house at the beach. True, exchanging birthday cards or even underwriting the aging parents-in-law is not quite the same as buying a docile adolescent (a bride for your son) to do the household scut work. Although we don’t see creating kin as a reason to marry, many Westerners still expect marriage to extend our families.
But if you put kinship at its center, marriage has very different rules and boundaries than does marriage for love. On one edge of the circle is the limit on how far out you can marry—or, as we know it, the race taboo—while the other edge is the limit on how far you can marry in, or the incest taboo. That circle of permitted intimacies can have still another dimension: the question of whether your society will allow or even require more than one spouse per person, whether because of traditional—or shall we say, biblical—polygamy or because of a utopian vision. Where should we draw the boundaries of our tribe? If marriage is about making kin, should we create more kin with more marriages? When and why do societies allow people to marry in, or out, or often?
In other words, what kinship should be permitted? This question comes up in the debate over same-sex marriage: proponents say that banning same-sex couples is as unjust as banning interracial marriage; opponents insist that, to the contrary, banning same-sex couples is as righteous as banning incest and polygamy. If same-sex marriage is allowed, must we strike down every other marriage taboo? Your answers will grow from what you think marriage—and human life—are for.
Marrying Out: Barricading the Tribe
If marriage is for creating bonds among families, what is to be done about those who defy the circle of designated equals, bleeding away the tribe’s human capital to people who aren’t “ours”? That’s the question that was debated in the most infamous scar in the United States’ history of marriage laws: the ban on “miscegenation,” a word invented in the social turmoil just after the Civil War. At one point, forty-one American states and territories barred marriage between the races. The mixed-marriage battle is full of rhetoric that is, word for word, interchangeable with the rhetoric hurled today against same-sex marriage. Can the American battle over interracial marriage fairly be compared to the fight for same-sex marriage?
To answer that, we need some historical background. Most groups throughout history have insisted that their daughters (and yes, the rhetoric is always about whether “their” men should be allowed to have “our” daughters) keep their wombs inside the tribe. One Old Testament man named Phineas speared to death a fellow Hebrew who married a “Midianitish woman”—an act reported in a Numbers verse that some white supremacists today use to justify murdering mixed-race couples. Over time the Jews’ punishment of out-marriage became more muted, although emotions remain high: when I told my rabbi’s wife I was a lesbian, she urged me, if I were ever to have a child, to be sure that the father/donor was a Jew (and if you’re Jewish, you’ve heard this language a thousand times) because “Hitler tried to wipe us out. Let’s not finish the job ourselves.” Whether the threat’s Hitler, Haman, or the Midianites, the Jews’ recoil from mixed marriage has always been intensely tribal—and explicitly political.
But the Jews are merely the example I know most intimately. We’ve all, by now, read about Serb/Croat marriages sundered in that region’s recent genocidal civil wars. Just after Ireland’s Easter peace accords in 1998, a Catholic woman’s house was set on fire and her children murdered—apparently because she lived with a Protestant. We needn’t agree with such terrorism to understand its logic: If you believe urgently in your group’s solidarity, identity, and strength, how can you not react when your members marry out? How is the tribe to continue if it gets mixed up with those who aren’t “us”—who aren’t fully human, in the way we are human?
In the United States, we have the unfortunate distinction of being able to trace the invention, enforcement, and then destruction of one such out-marrying taboo. Marriage between black and white was not always unthinkable. According to one historian, the upper- or merchant-class British immigrants in the American colonies looked down equally on enslaved Africans and indentured Irish, assigning them to the same tasks and holding them equally in contempt. Sharing their lives in their owners’ kitchens and downstairs, Irish or lower-class British indentured servants and African enslaved servants often married. Learning how they came to be severed by the “miscegenation” sword reminds us
that group borders are far less permanent or inevitable than, even today, we imagine.
The story starts with British laws, which the colonies took as their legal model—and which had no race bar. And so, when the colonies began, it was not yet clear what would be the difference between slavery and indentured servitude, except that one was for a set period—seven or eleven years—and the other was for life. Nor was it immediately obvious that Africanness would become an inherited caste, overriding any other ancestry. Why should someone whose parents were African and Irish be more “black” than Irish (especially if the child was as white-skinned as her Irish mother)? Some colonial courts even decided that European ancestry trumped African: presented with the puzzle of a slave woman who’d given birth to a white man’s child, one eighteenth-century Connecticut judge freed the boy, reasoning that he “has English blood in him, and therefore was born free.”
Legislators rolled up their sleeves to clear up such confusions. Between the 1660s and 1725, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Delaware, and Pennsylvania enacted laws that prevented “abominable mixture and spurious issue.” Legislators revised and refined these laws repeatedly throughout the 1600s and early 1700s, trying to get just the right punishment for the “crime.” Eventually the colonies and states found the rule that was most useful for perpetuating the institution of slavery (and African heritage, with which it was soon confused): inherited status. First, a slave woman’s children inherited their mother’s “condition,” unlike a free woman’s children, who got their name and class identity from their father. That meant that all a slave woman’s children were always slaves and officially black, no matter how European in features and skin tone (“bright,” in the jargon). Conveniently for whites, this meant that no matter from which side you got it, African heritage overrode European—allowing white men to increase their property by having sex with or raping enslaved women with impunity, while white women who had sex with black men were out-caste, their children visibly bastards (and the men in danger of lynching).
The rule, in other words—like the British rule of fillius nullius, which insisted that a child could never be legitimated by his parents’ later marriage—protected ruling-caste men from the consequences of sexually using lower-caste women. Legal commentators, in fact, justified the laws via an old British legal ruling that a particular countess could not possibly have married her footman but had merely had a seamy affair. Sure, you might have sex with menials, but marry them? That was too degrading to be thinkable.
And yet feelings against intermarriage were not, at first, as ferocious as they later became. When slavery was fully in place and thoroughly enforced, or when black migration from the South to the new territories or northern states was only a trickle, free men and women could occasionally acknowledge African ancestry and still marry someone of European background—in colonies or states as different as Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and New York. Wealth, particularly, made a difference. In South Carolina in 1731, one committee assigned to investigate a new resident of color—Gideon Gibson, “mulatto”—even took his marriage as a proof of his reliability: “The account he has given of himself is so Satisfactory that he is no Vagabond that I have in Consideration of his Wifes being a white woman.” The legislature allowed the Gibsons, like some other mulatto/white pairings, to settle on the South Carolina frontier; their children married into rich (white) planter families. In other cases, there was simply no penalty unless the marriage was free/slave. Alabama, for instance, allowed marriage “between any free persons” throughout colonial times and early statehood, and as a result had a variety of mixed-race marriages—both between white men and women of color, and between white women and men of color.
Border skirmishes—the insistence on patrolling a sharp difference between black and white—increased as slavery began to crumble and abolitionism rose—and, not coincidentally, as less and less colonized territory remained available for new settlers’ use. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Civil War, frontier territories like Indiana, Illinois, and Tennessee tried to ban freed blacks or escaped slaves from moving into their states—and thus threatening their control of land. As one Illinois opponent of black migration into his territory said, “If we would allow the negroes any kind of equality we must admit them to the social hearth . . . and also, if they desired it, must not object to proposals to marry our daughters.” That fear wasn’t entirely spurious: Although land was the main resource for which whites wanted no competition, another equally essential and limited commodity was the pioneer wife, since men seriously outnumbered women on the colonizing frontier. And so when attempts to ban black migration failed, state legislators instead passed interracial marriage bans.
Many intermarriage laws, especially in the South, were briefly repealed or suspended at the Civil War’s end—but then returned with a vengeance. A sense that slave equalled African equalled inferior had deeply stained the white psyche, which propped up its beliefs with a notorious range of tools from violence to segregation, among them the interracial marriage bans. The new laws were complicated by the near impossibility—by the nineteenth century—of clearly defining race. Plenty of people in the South descended not just from Irish maidservant/African manservant marriages—consensual and perhaps even equal—but also from illicit or forced relationships between white male owners or overseers and black female slaves whose offspring had escaped or been freed and who “passed.” Even prominent “white” families might know, suspect, or merely fear a mixed ancestor or two. One 1850 Alabama court rejected the idea that “mulattoes” must be defined as anything more than the children of one black and one white parent, writing, “if the statute against mulattoes is . . . to include quadroons, then where are we to stop? . . . are we not bound to pursue the line of descendants, so long as there is a drop of negro blood remaining?” Alabama and other legislatures hastened to correct the judge’s misconception, defining “quadroons” as black. And yet white Southern legislatures didn’t dare, until very late, define “black” as being any more than one-quarter, or one grandparent, of African descent.
Even that definition was so ridiculous that many people wound up in court over racial identity. In North Carolina in 1832, two Caucasian grooms—after their apparently white wives gave birth to apparently “mulatto” children—tried to annul their marriages. In the first case the judge refused, saying that “persons who marry take each other as they are.” Faced with community outrage, he ruled differently on the next case, writing, “This is a concession to the deep-rooted and virtuous prejudices of the community.” Is yours a legal marriage? Yes, if seven of your great-grandparents are Caucasian, but if only six are, no. It sounds abominable if you believe that affection and commitment make a marriage—but it’s quite serious if you believe that marriage is to fortify and barricade your tribe.
The enforcing of racial boundaries via antimiscegenation laws actually escalated after slavery was abolished. As legal historian Lawrence Friedman puts it, “What was at first a law for the servant class developed deeper and deeper overtones of color. The slave laws then became laws about the fate of a race.” Alabama, for instance, first passed an intermarriage ban in 1863. Meanwhile, legislators responded to the racial-identity crisis by issuing increasingly stringent definitions of race. By the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, Southern states pushed the definition of “Negro” beyond the quadroon to one-eighth African heritage, one-sixteenth (fifteen European great-grandparents and one African made you “black”), and finally, the infamous “one drop.” In other words, people legally “white” in the nineteenth century became “black” in the twentieth—revealing as utter fiction any ideas about the races’ fundamental difference. That one drop was taken quite literally, as if people could sift through corpuscles to find the contaminating “Negro” blood. One writer insisted that “under certain conditions, Negro virus, like other poisons, has a power of diffusion superior to pure blood”�
��an infection that could make you sick, that traditional and irrational fear of sexual plague. One Louisiana statute declared that every white person should have the right to refuse transfusions from “coloreds,” an ideology that at its most extreme might be interpreted “better dead than brown.” Still others used the blood metaphor to their advantage: one white New Orleans cashier transfused himself with blood from his beloved, a black woman, and then, claiming to be black himself, legally married her.
The more social equality seemed possible, the more intermarriage hysteria mounted. In the year 1913—in the infancy of the NAACP—twelve separate state legislatures were considering anti-interracial marriage bills, including California, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, and Wisconsin. When in the 1940s Gunnar Myrdal asked white and black Southerners to rank the importance of various segregation rules, whites “nearly unanimously” ranked the ban on intermarriage first, with economic discrimination in jobs, credit, and housing last. Southern blacks ranked the same items in exactly the opposite order, with jobs on top, even before the vote, and at the bottom “the marriage matter . . . of rather distant and doubtful interest.” Which is not to say black folks were for intermarriage bans. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1913, “to prohibit such intermarriage would be publicly to acknowledge that black blood is a physical taint, something no self-respecting colored man and woman can be asked to admit.” But for most black people the ban rankled only symbolically, since they mostly fell in love with and married other black folks. Jobs, voting rights, education, and the daily threat of death for walking into the wrong restroom were far more urgent and immediate. Besides, why would anyone proud of his or her race fight for the few individuals who wanted to abandon the tribe—which only confirms the ruling caste’s smug belief that what your kind really wants is a taste of their kind? No wonder, when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund planned its attack on segregation laws, or when the 1960s civil rights movement turned TV cameras like neon arrows on Southern buses and lunch counters and schoolrooms, or when Malcolm X urged freedom from the white devils by any means necessary, intermarriage—with its high public relations cost and negligible benefit—did not rank on the black political agenda. Even today, Loving v. Virginia—the court case that brought down antimiscegenation laws—does not even rate an index entry in books about the civil rights movement.