Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of “Race” in Twentieth-Century America

Modernist racial ideology has been widely accepted; indeed, it compels nearly as much adherence in the late-twentieth-century United States as racialism did in the late nineteenth century. Miscegenation laws, in force from the 1660s through the 1960s, were among the longest lasting of American racial restrictions. Judicial justifications reflected the momentum toward racial categorization built into the nineteenth-century legal system and buttressed by the racialist conviction that everything from culture, morality, and intelligence to heredity could be understood in terms of race. Minions of racialism, judges, juries, and experts sometimes quarreled over specifics, but they agreed on the overriding importance of making and enforcing racial classifications. Historians have rather quickly passed over the racial aspects of American eugenics, seeing its proponents as advocates of outmoded ideas soon to be beached by the culturalist sea change. The Virginia miscegenation law was a case in point; the Court recognized and condemned it as a statute clearly “designed to maintain White Supremacy”.

Ideology · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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