Marriage “Beyond the Pale”: “Mixed” Marriage, “Miscegenation,” and Assimilation

Abstract

Marriage most obviously regulates and polices sex/gender boundaries and behaviors. Marriage is a focus for sex, gender, and sexuality studies, but until recently these rarely attended to the ways racism has figured in marriage law. However, a flurry of new research has begun to consider marriage’s recent and shamefully rich history as a mechanism for policing “race” and protecting white privilege.¹ As a whole, such research aims to illustrate the particular threat interracial marriage has posed to racist societies. Until this upsurge of interest in marriage and racism, there were very few analyses of the intersection of racism and sexism in contemporary marriage. Instead, attention has been focused much more consistently on colonial times and Indigenous cultures, producing a number of fascinating and sometimes profound histories and ethnographies of marriage.² The best of these endeavor to connect past and present, but too often the explicitly racist rules and prohibitions that shaped marriage before the late 1960s are presented as if they had no continuing effects—as if marriage’s racist past has been entirely undone.