Miscegenation

many of our citizens to marry the one they love. It was only fifty years ago on June 12, 1967, that the Supreme Court repealed all miscegenation laws giving heterosexual couples of different races the option to marry one another. Miscegenation laws date to the 1600’s with Virginia being the first state to make interracial marriage illegal. There seems to be on common theme behind the miscegenation laws, the fear of interracial sex.…

Miscegenation is the relationships or interbreeding of individuals of different races. The miscegenation laws were intended to enforce racial segregation in relationships and intermarriage. Many of these laws prohibited “both interracial sex and interracial marriage, but nearly as twice targeted only marriage” (Pascoe, 1996, p. 8). The applicable theme for miscegenation is Culture and Society (CUL). Miscegenation and its laws focus on the beliefs and social mores of society toward racial…

Endurance of Pain in Native Guard Charles Wright has stated that in poetry “only pain endures.” Two poems from Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, “Miscegenation” and “The Southern Crescent,” showcase the emotional pain experienced by the characters. These characters are ostracized by their communities and are essentially forced to leave their homes for fear of racial segregation; unfortunately, these journeys are met largely with disappointment and heartbreak. The speaker’s parents in…

Miscegenation as the central theme of literary works has not often been a subject welcomed by the whites in the United States of America. Many books were forbidden or faced harsh criticism for engaging in such controversial topics. Even innocent children story books, such as The Rabbits´ Wedding, where often the characters were animals only portraying a friendly relationship with animals of different colours were considered offensive (18). The reason lay with the society´s assumption that a…

My research project began with a broad topic: miscegenation in colonial Latin America. Professor Ray gave us the freedom to choose a specific colonial context in which to explore the themes of gender, race, and sexuality. The previous semester, I did a research project on enslaved women in the Caribbean, so I knew I wanted to explore Latin America to learn more about that specific colonial context. In order to find primary sources that would help me narrow down my project further, I went to…

blacks. This case discusses how Virginia's law to segregate blacks and whites from marrying each other was eventually overturned by the superior court because of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protections Clause. In the year 1958, Mildred Jeter (a black female) and Richard Loving (a white male) got married in the District of Colombia, but are residents of Virginia. After the newly engaged couple returned to Virginia, they were charged with breaking the anti-miscegenation statute. This statute…

Mestizaje is a Spanish term that is acknowledged when the individual is interrelated of mixed descendant and also related to miscegenation. There are a variety of different societal attitudes towards Mestizaje and Miscegenation. Furthermore, scholars who studied racial and gender formations have affirmed that people who embodied multiracial descent disrupt, “the social projects which create and reproduce structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race that have existed since…

The colony’s head patriarchs monitored sexual behavior in order to prevent the birth of mulatto children which had the potential to confuse the divide between blacks and whites. “That for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever.” Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion interracial sex was legal, but…

Since the landmark of Loving v. Virginia case, interracial marriages in the United States have escalated dramatically with more individuals engaging in these types of marriages. The need for interracial couples to conceal their romance in public was not necessary anymore and were given the freedom to marry without worrying about their race. Although these types of relationships would no longer face any legal restrictions, they continue to encounter discrimination and prejudice in modern day. A…

Loving v. Virginia was a case in 1967 about invalidating laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case was argued in April of 1967 and decided later in June. Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, lived in Caroline County, Virginia. Since there was a state law prohibiting interracial marriage in Virginia, they got married in Washington DC in 1958. This anti-miscegenation law was called “Racial Integrity Act of 1924”. A few weeks after they returned to Virginia, they…