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One dark body
Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies
BY SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS

Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption
By Randall Kennedy. Pantheon Books, 690 pages, $30.


The seduction of a centennial requires one to note the perfect hundred years splayed between the present day and W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous oracle from The Souls of Black Folk that " the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. " The 20th century must be smirking, having come and gone with its " problem " well intact. One is not sure whether to call Du Bois a prophet (for his astute diagnosis) or a fool (for ever believing in a cure). Without ever ceasing to be true, the " problem of the color line " has become cliché, and now comes Randall Kennedy to whisper a secret back across the decades: the line never existed at all.

Or at least, it was never drawn as heavily as we imagined. Kennedy — a Harvard Law professor, an opponent of affirmative action, and the author notorious for last year’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon) — continues to crusade against the evils of " racial reasoning. " He exposes the color line as a futile border, porous no matter how heavily it’s policed. Whereas Nigger shocked, enlightened, and enraged, Interracial Intimacies uses a cool tone to engage the twisted genealogy that’s created when the line is crossed.

Du Bois himself walked the line: the great son of Great Barrington (a prophet after all, and the best kind of patriot, too, denouncing the fascisms of race and class in his native land to die a citizen of Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington) was born to a Dutch-African mother and a French Huguenot father in 1868. In the shadow of the Civil War, this union was actually legal: in 1843 Massachusetts became the first state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law.

Such laws predated the republic, an early symptom of race-sex sickness endemic to a nation built by slaves who were controlled, in large part, by the force of coercive sex. Kennedy traces these anxieties from the 17th century toward a future where, even if Du Bois’s riddle remains unsolved, the crossing of racial boundaries rarely brings with it the threat of death or legal disenfranchisement. From the plantation to the Supreme Court, Intimacies offers myriad examples: inheritances are usurped and marriages annulled because of one drop of black blood; a young child is rejected by white relatives and denied adoption by black parents to be made a ward of the state, legally of no race and no family because of her mixed parentage; the question of school integration is sexualized from Dixie to Southie by the refrain " Would you want your daughter to marry one? "

These public legal horrors are shadowed by the secret history of racial intimacy in America, where it was easier for an interracial couple to live in peace in 1860 than in the same jurisdiction half a century later at the height of negrophobia and lynch mobs; where various tales of passing ought to send all " white " Americans of non-immigrant stock back to their family trees for verification; where the seemingly innocuous expression of racial preferences in personal ads reveals an ugly mix of race fetish based on latent white supremacy.

Sifting through centuries of legal documents, illuminated by examples from literature, biography, and current events, Kennedy’s expansive history is a triumph. The complications of obscure marriage, miscegenation, and adoption laws are handled so expertly as to assume a dramatic pathos. Without excessive whining, Kennedy, over the course of more than 600 pages, develops a clear argument: the psychic, social, and material toll of the racial regime in America has punished us all.

In 1903, Du Bois wrote of the black American, " one ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. " One hundred years later, Interracial Intimacies shows us that this conflicted soul is the body politic entire: black, white, and other.

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003
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