White Weddings, The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Rev. Jesse Jackson is irked by the hit film Barbershop, in which a character played by Cedric the Entertainer complains that Rosa Parks gets too much credit for the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. Parks, he says, is deified because she was affiliated with the NAACP; worthier pioneers were simply forgotten. Is the movie's history lesson accurate?

Pretty much. Nine months before Parks famously refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for the identical crime. On March 2, 1955, Colvin boarded a bus opposite Martin Luther King Jr.'s church on Montgomery's Dexter Avenue. She was seated next to a pregnant African-American woman known only as "Mrs. Hamilton." As the bus became crowded, the driver requested that the pair stand so whites could sit. Both refused, although another black passenger eventually let Hamilton take his place. Colvin, angry over the arrest of a classmate who'd been accused of raping a white woman, stood firm and was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest, and violating municipal segregation laws.

She was later found guilty and placed on probation. Though her plight attracted national attention, local black leaders were reluctant to use Colvin as a test case. She became pregnant by a much older man soon after the arrest, which scandalized the deeply religious community. The white press, they assumed, would flaunt Colvin's illegitimate pregnancy as a means of undermining any boycott. Some historians also argue that civil-rights leaders, who were predominately middle class, were uneasy with Colvin's impoverished background.

On Oct. 21 of that same year, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was also arrested for defying a bus driver's orders to relinquish her seat. She was upset after being stiffed for $11 by her employer, a white woman for whom she worked as a maid. Yet again, Montgomery activists were hesitant to turn a teenager's arrest into a cause célèbre. It is widely believed that rumors concerning Smith's father's alcoholism were a turnoff. (Smith vehemently denies that her father drank.)

Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP, was not arrested until Dec. 1, 1955.

Colvin now lives in the Bronx, at last report working as a nurse's aide. Smith still lives in Montgomery, in virtual anonymity.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2071622

Black and white and taboo all over Hollywood is more phobic than ever about interracial love, but now it's blacks who are putting on the brakes. By Charles Taylor

Feb. 14, 2000 | "Archie said he never thought he'd see the day when white and colored would be kissin' from coast to coast."

"If the only time you show a balanced relationship is in an interracial relationship, whether it's conscious or subconscious, it sends a message I'm not comfortable with."

One of the perennials that always shows up on history-of-TV compilations is the clip from a 1968 musical special in which Petula Clark lightly rested her hand on Harry Belafonte's arm as they sang a duet. That brief touch freaked out Chrysler so badly that it threatened to pull its sponsorship. The clip is always offered in a self-congratulatory "look how far we've come" spirit.

But the secret imperative behind most of Hollywood's black and white star pairings remains: Look but don't touch. We've all been trained by years of moviegoing to know that at some point in thrillers or romantic comedies -- after the growing rapport, the looks that linger just a second longer than necessary -- the male and female leads will get together. Except, that is, when the leading couple is interracial. You can wait until the last credit has rolled in "The Pelican Brief" or "Men in Black" or "Murder at 1600," all movies in which there's a definite chemistry between the black and white leads, and the only physical contact you'll see is -- perhaps -- an affectionate but decidedly nonsexual embrace.

There are no complex sociological reasons for the taboo still attached to interracial romance in movies. It's racism, pure and simple. Perhaps these attitudes are sometimes connected to an executive's fear that audiences will be turned off by the sight of black and white together, but a decision that bows to racism must bear the mark of racism itself.

The difference today is that black actors and audiences may be just as turned off by miscegenation as white ones. We have come from ridiculing Chrysler's horror over a white woman briefly touching a black man to seeing nothing wrong with "ER" star LaSalle's implicit claim that his character's affair with a white woman was an insult to black women. LaSalle, whose character had had unsuccessful relationships with black women in the past, "requested" that the show's writers end the affair because "it sends a message I'm not comfortable with," a message that this relationship could be a happy one. Presumably, LaSalle wouldn't have had any troubles if his character's relationship with Kingston's had been rocky. In other words, it would have been acceptable if it had been depicted as being as doomed as bigots -- the kind who deny being bigots, the "I'm just thinking of the children" variety -- have always said interracial relationships must be.

When it comes to movies, the two films that best highlight the differences between the two eras are Stanley Kramer's 1967 "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and Spike Lee's 1991 "Jungle Fever." Both terrible movies by terrible filmmakers willing to subordinate everything to their "message," the films are nonetheless fairly accurate barometers of each era's acceptable liberal sympathies. In Kramer's film, the good, affluent parents played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have to confront their own prejudices when their daughter turns up married to Sidney Poitier. In Lee's film, Wesley Snipes is a married black architect who has an affair with his white assistant, played by Annabella Sciorra.

Lee pays lip service to the way each character is rejected by family and friends as a result of the affair, but he can't hide his disgust with the relationship. (Sciorra has spoken in interviews of how she had to fight to give her character dimension.) The first time Snipes and Sciorra have sex is after hours at their office, on top of a drafting table. It's a device that first popped up in '80s movies like "Fatal Attraction": When the filmmakers want to show disapproval of extramarital sex, they shoot it so that it looks physically uncomfortable. (Think of Michael Douglas screwing Glenn Close while she's perched on the kitchen sink.) Lee's message is a blatant version of the thought that hovers in Hepburn's and Tracy's minds in the Kramer film: "Wouldn't you be happier with your own kind?"

We've reached a point where segregation has become an acceptable liberal position. (It isn't conservative critics who praise Spike Lee movies.) But separatism is not the same thing as either self-determination or racial pride. I'd argue that pride finds its strongest expression in the midst of difference.

Not that every movie has to be scrupulously integrated. It would be great to see more movies with all-black casts, and the crossover success of the romantic comedy "The Best Man" last year or "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" in 1998 means we may get them. There's a thrill in seeing black actors starring in the classic Hollywood genres blacks have traditionally been excluded from (and a thrill in seeing just how viable those forms can still be). The hugely entertaining "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" is, except for its welcome sexual forthrightness, like those dishy women's pictures of the '40s, full of gossip and luxe surroundings. But it's a drag to see one character's white husband used as an example of her snobbishness. "The Hurricane" has no qualms about exaggerating the role of three white Canadians in freeing Rubin Carter from prison, but it doesn't even mention that in real life Carter had an affair with and eventually married one of them.

Presumably it's OK to show Washington going to bed with a white woman (Milla Jovovich) in Lee's "He Got Game" because her character is a whore. (That's how all the white women, and many of the black women, are portrayed in this viciously misogynist film.) But even that was apparently enough, as was reported when the film was released, to cause some black female viewers to claim that Washington had betrayed them. (There were no objections to Washington's bedding down with an Indian actress, Sarita Choudhury, for some truly sexy love scenes in Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala.")

The only criterion that should be applied to movie pairings is: Do they work? Actors and directors are hamstrung if their exploration of human relationships is made to pass some test of sociological acceptability. Real-life relationships rarely conform to such standards; sexual attraction is chaos. Why should it seem otherwise in the movies?

Of course we should be able to see comedies and love stories and thrillers with two black stars. It's insulting (to both races) to assume that a movie with black actors will be successful only if there's also a white person in it. But whatever the justification, there are no good reasons to prevent moviemakers from pairing, say, Angela Bassett and Daniel Day-Lewis, Vanessa L. Williams and George Clooney, Snipes and Julia Roberts, Taye Diggs and Chloe Sevigny, Courtney B. Vance (one of the most underused good actors around) and Sigourney Weaver. Think of where racial separatism has gotten us in our movie past. There are no musicals that paired Lena Horne and Gene Kelly, no comedies in which Belafonte might have dallied with Marilyn Monroe, nothing to suggest what two fastidious actors like the young Poitier and the young Jane Fonda might have brought out in each other.

Black male stars have had an easier time of it, but -- with the exception of Washington -- mostly in action movie roles or playing sidekick roles. That's not to slight the pleasure I've had watching Snipes or Ving Rhames in movies like "Blade" or "Mission: Impossible," but I'd love to see them do other things. I can't be the only moviegoer who loved the teddy-bear slyness Rhames brought to his role in "Out of Sight" and envisioned what he might do in comedy. Perhaps the best male performance of last year was Charles S. Dutton in "Cookie's Fortune," and yet he didn't register in any of the year-end awards. Often, the pleasure of watching black actors is tinged with the realization that it may be a long time before you see that actor in another role as good.

Black and white pairings don't seem to be a big deal in foreign movies, as David Thewlis and Thandie Newton showed in Bernardo Bertolucci's great "Besieged," one of the most potent recent movie love stories, and one of the most potent recent movies, period. Likewise with Beatrice Dalle and Alex Descas in "I Can't Sleep," directed by Claire Denis, whose films have frequently dealt with interracial issues. Perhaps those aren't good examples because the issues of interracial love are part of those films' subtext. The same tends to be true of American movies that feature interracial couples. The most intelligent were both made by Carl Franklin -- "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," the latter featuring Washington's best performance.

The fact that a taboo still exists has led some directors to act as provocateurs. At the beginning of "Freeway," a deliciously twisted B-thriller that constantly challenges the assumptions we make based on appearance, Reese Witherspoon shares a big, wet, lazily hungry kiss with her black boyfriend (Bokeem Woodbine), and as director Matthew Bright focuses on the young lovers, you can feel his glee at potentially making some people uncomfortable. And there's overt provocation in Mike Figgis' presentation of a white Eve dallying with a black Adam in "The Loss of Sexual Innocence." (That provocation temporarily scuttled the movie at one point, when a white South African producer pulled out.)

In an industry in which black-white love is still taboo, we need that sort of effrontery. But even more subversive may be the times when love between blacks and whites is treated as no big deal. Race isn't an issue in Figgis' adultery drama "One Night Stand," in which Snipes has an affair with Nastassja Kinski. Several pictures that were geared more toward the mainstream also take a nonchalant attitude toward race: William H. Macy has a black wife in last year's "Mystery Men," and in "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" Jeff Goldblum (whose character is divorced) has a black daughter (the talented young actress Vanessa Lee Chester).

There's a sort of ball's-in-your-court challenge to the refusal of these movies to treat black-white love as anything out of the ordinary. And inevitably the people who return the serve only prove the point. After "The Lost World" came out, I guested on a radio talk show where the conservative host (also a movie critic) kept harping on the movie as a typical example of Hollywood liberalism. Most people, he insisted, would find it strange that there is no explanation of how a white man has a black daughter (the usual methods, I wanted to say). This man's condescending certainty that the great unwashed would certainly find the idea of black-white marriage strange beyond belief wasn't the only thing he had wrong. A typical piece of Hollywood liberalism would feel obliged to address Goldblum's marriage and the reasons (presumably racial) that it broke up. Steven Spielberg's treatment of it as just the way life is (marriages break up sometimes) is much more sophisticated.

Perhaps no movie has done more to erase the taboo simply by ignoring it than "The Bodyguard." This big, kitschy 1992 star fantasy plays as if someone had gotten the idea of combining Barbra Streisand's remake of "A Star Is Born" with a Steve McQueen movie. (Kevin Costner even adopts McQueen's haircut.) But it's the most glamorous, and therefore the most unapologetic, depiction of interracial romance in the movies. For all the reasons that drive apart Whitney Houston's diva and Costner's hunky human shield, race isn't one of them. It's never even mentioned. They part for the most melodramatic of movie reasons -- he can't protect her if he's distracted by falling in love with her.

"The Bodyguard" is a bad good time, but it's also startling because it places black-white love within the context of the movie traditions that have excluded it. The message is that movie glamour transcends all other concerns, that race should be no obstacle to pleasure. I've heard all sorts of objections raised to the movie, from the ludicrous suggestion that a white man having sex with a black woman recalls master-slave relations (forget that Houston is the aggressor here as well as the one in the position of power) to the outright racist suggestion that Houston is so successful she's an honorary white person. (Success nullifies your race?) But the fact is that movies with big stars tend to be very conservative. Yet Costner, then at the peak of his popularity, and Houston, making her movie debut, risked alienating some of their fans. And the movie was a huge hit.

Since movie executives listen to three things in determining what movies get made -- money, money and money -- the success of "The Bodyguard" should have told them that black and white pairings are no impediment at the box office. If they thought they could make money by showing Noam Chomsky reading Hegel for three hours, they would. That makes the cowardice that has characterized other recent movies all the more frustrating.

Reportedly, a love scene between Snipes and Diane Lane (a well-matched pairing of instinctive, quick-witted actors) was filmed and then cut from "Murder at 1600." The plot device that keeps wiping out Linda Fiorentino's memory in "Men in Black" also conveniently keeps the playful flirtation between her and Will Smith from ever reaching fruition. In "The Pelican Brief," Roberts and Washington are thrown together in a danger-fraught fight against an evil conspiracy (a great movie excuse for sex if ever there was one). But when they wind up in a secluded cabin in the middle of the night, you get the sinking feeling that what's coming next is a vigorous game of Scrabble. (The only movie in which the failure of the black and white stars to clinch doesn't seem like a copout is Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," where the movie's melancholy comes from the fact that Pam Grier and Robert Forster can't make their attraction to each other work.)

No other interracial pairing remains as taboo as black-white. The wife Snipes cheats on in "One Night Stand" is an Asian woman (Ming-Na Wen), and in "Rising Sun" he carries on a charming flirtation with Tia Carrere, who plays the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American. (The flirtation remains unconsummated because she is otherwise involved.) And white-Asian pairings have been a longtime movie favorite for stories of lovers with the odds stacked against them, like Lauren Holly and Jason Scott Lee in the Bruce Lee bio "Dragon" or, currently, Ethan Hawke and Youki Kudoh in "Snow Falling on Cedars." (Considering how Asians were portrayed in American movies during World War II, that has to be counted as some kind of progress.)

Strangely, this separatism seems to me to run against the grain of nearly every other branch of pop culture. Hip-hop and the new-style R&B of artists like D'Angelo and Macy Gray now dominate American pop music. I'd venture that as many white reading groups as black ones choose books by Terry McMillan or Walter Mosley or even a tougher read like Toni Morrison. And despite the divisions that keep black sitcoms like "Moesha" hits among black viewers and virtually unknown among white ones, despite NBC's recent admission that it doesn't feature many black faces, black actors are a strong presence on TV.

Forget the black actors who are regular cast members of hit shows. A few months back on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Giles greeted (and immediately went to bed with) a black girlfriend who came to visit. A recent New York Times piece on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" noted that the practice of showing the contestant's partner in the audience hasn't shied away from either interracial couples or gay ones. A couple of weeks ago in an offhand moment on "The Practice," Michael Badalucco's character admitted that growing up watching "Mannix" he had a crush on Mannix's secretary, Peggy. He didn't mention that she was played by a black actress (Gail Fisher), nor did he need to. You're attracted to whom you're attracted to.

I'm not so naive as to suggest that the popularity of black singers or writers or actors signals the end of racism. The great big-band leader Artie Shaw told a terrible story about touring the Deep South in the '30s with Billie Holiday as the band's featured singer. At one gig, after her scheduled number, the audience went wild, not wanting to let Holiday get away. One guy down front yelled, "Have the nigger wench sing another one!" and simply didn't understand it when Holiday talked back to him.

But the no-longer-token presence of blacks in mainstream pop culture has to count for some progress, though it hasn't yet quelled movie squeamishness at showing black and white people falling in love or into bed. That reluctance refuses to recognize a basic reality of a world where the sight of black and white couples is more prevalent than ever. And it's also blind to the fact that most of us go to the movies for pleasure and don't much care where it comes from. When the pleasure principle is shortchanged, either by not giving good actors the roles they deserve or by keeping apart the ones whose star power draws them together, it doesn't matter how good our seats are. We've all been relegated to the balcony.

http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/02/14/interracial_movies/

Eyes on the prize, Will the civil rights battle finally be won in bed? By Joan Walsh

Feb. 5, 2003  |  One of George W. Bush's biggest campaign blunders was his February 2000 visit to South Carolina's Bob Jones University, a bastion of the segregationist South that had finally admitted some students of color, but still banned interracial dating. Critics had a clear shot at Bush, whose own brother Jeb could have fallen victim to the university's invidious rule, since his wife Colomba is Mexican (producing three mixed-race grandchildren whom the first President Bush famously called "the little brown ones.") "You could make the case that 'compassionate conservatism' died Feb. 2 when Bush appeared at Bob Jones U," conservative William Kristol fulminated. Of course, the beleaguered GOP candidate had to denounce the school's interracial-dating ban, and soon even benighted Bob Jones U. did away with it, too.

Nowadays, with the president's brother a miscegenationist, and the right's favorite black man, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, married to a white woman, it's hard to find anybody who will publicly attack interracial romance, beyond the fringes of white supremacist Web sites -- and, of course, the popular black media. Take November's Essence magazine, a glossy geared to black women, which featured a major spread headlined "Bring me home a black girl" by contributing editor Audrey Edwards, laying out how and why she's indoctrinated her stepson not to date white women.

Edwards, a respected, veteran journalist, is unapologetic about her racially biased home training. "For Black women, one of the inequities on the current playing field has been the rate at which Black men are marrying outside their race," she says. Too many black men think they're marrying up socially by marrying out racially, Edwards believes, so it's up to black moms to convince their sons by any means necessary -- including guilt, shame and ostracism -- not to date white.

I tried not to take Edwards' piece personally, but it was hard, because I'm one of the race mixers; I have intermingled, interdated, intermarried. My ex-husband, still a close friend, is Jewish, my boyfriend is black, as are several of my best female friends. I know from experience: Get too close to the fiery eruptions of toxic, black double standards on race, and you will get burned. The first time I encountered the old "I like whites just fine -- but I wouldn't want my brother to marry one" hypocrisy, it felt like I'd been slapped. Over the years I've come to see that as a minority sentiment in the black community, and despite stories about angry sisters harassing white woman-black man couples, by far the worst treatment I've encountered as a result of being with a black man -- dirty looks, nasty comments, rudeness -- has been from whites.

Still, it's stating the obvious to observe that no mainstream magazine today would publish a comparable piece by a Caucasian mom exhorting her son to "Bring me home a white girl!" (However, Jews are allowed to voice such misgivings publicly; convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams developed a sideline as a crusader against Jewish intermarriage before Bush hired him as the National Security Council's director of Middle Eastern policy. Even after the Bob Jones debacle, nobody from the administration asked Abrams to renounce his stand against Jews marrying non-Jews, but I'll get to that later.) Yet black-oriented magazines and Web sites continue to clamor with a debate over interracial romance that's alternately infuriating and poignant -- and also on a collision course with demography.

In a recent Gallup/USA Today poll, 57 percent of teenagers said they'd dated someone from another race, up from 17 percent just 20 years ago. The number of interracial marriages has more than doubled in that same period, and while blacks are still less likely to marry outside their race than other minority groups, the number of black-white marriages has almost tripled. Maybe most remarkable, because Edwards is right that the trend has favored black men, the number of black women marrying white men has more than quadrupled, while the number of black men with white wives only doubled. In 1998, black-white couples in which the wife is black made up 37 percent of all black-white marriages nationwide, up from only 22 percent in 1980. It's not 50-50 parity yet, but at that rate of change, we'll get there soon. Race-mixing is clearly the future, and the more I looked at the data, the more I felt sympathy for Edwards, rather than resentment, because she's clearly clinging to a bygone past.

But when it comes to race, the past is never very far away. Beneath a discussion marked by surface consensus -- Of course we can all get along! I mean, Justin Timberlake dated Janet Jackson after Britney! -- roils confusion and rancor. Now along comes Randall Kennedy and his new book "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption," whose tone, against all odds, is scholarly, sober, even soothing. Kennedy's great accomplishment is his exhaustive recounting of the history of interracial intimacy in America -- from slavery and Jim Crow through the civil rights movement, up to Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," interracial adoption battles and even online dating today. He clears up some misconceptions about famous folks who did or didn't have interracial dalliances -- Booker T. Washington probably didn't, despite some claims to the contrary, but Strom Thurmond did. Yes, the man whose segregationist run for the White House in 1948 cost Trent Lott his Senate leadership 55 years later almost certainly fathered a child with his family's black maid, Kennedy concludes -- a fact that was revealed in Marilyn Thompson and Jack Bass' biography, "Ol' Strom," but was barely mentioned during the national conversation on race that ensued after Lott's racist remarks at Thurmond's centennial.

Having looked at all sides of this historical morality play, the black Harvard Law School professor takes a strong and bracing pro-mixing stance: "The flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development ... It signals that formal and informal racial boundaries are fading." One can share Kennedy's racial openness and optimism and still be skeptical, though: Does interracial intimacy herald the end of racism?

We don't know -- yet -- but Kennedy's book gets us closer to an answer. He offers tantalizing hints of the way psychosexual issues and economic ones combined to create the taboo against miscegenation, and he tackles related questions that emerge from our new interracial alliances. Are black men (and now, maybe, black women) ever trying to marry up when they marry out -- and is that ever OK? Is interracial intimacy an engine of racial progress, an indicator of it, both, or neither? And is there ever a case for racial solidarity, for discouraging cross-racial intimacy, whether in dating, marriage or adoption?

Kennedy knows exactly how complicated those questions are, and he grapples with all of them -- always sympathetically, occasionally a little naively. I scoured the Web to find out if he's married to a white woman, and was relieved to learn his wife is black -- then ashamed of my relief -- but not particularly surprised. He sometimes seems a visitor in the land of interracial romance, but mostly that makes for interesting observations. Sadly, given how polarizing this debate can be, it actually matters that Kennedy isn't justifying his own choice of a white wife, that he doesn't particularly have a stake in this battle. That is, beyond the stake all of us have: to create a prosperous multiracial democracy unblemished by the tragic inequities between blacks and whites -- in family income, in education, in health, in crime statistics, on virtually every major indicator of well-being we use -- that persist to this day, even as we intermarry and congratulate ourselves for it.

Reading "Interracial Intimacies" alongside Essence's "Bring me home a black girl," it's hard not to notice the way racist whites and some supposedly enlightened civil rights advocates have traded places. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," wrote the judge who upheld Virginia's ban on interracial marriage in the wonderfully named Loving vs. Commonwealth case (which ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court overturning all such statutes, but not until 1967). "The fact that he separated the races shows he did not intend for the races to mix." Early chapters of Kennedy's book show a long history of bizarre attempts to enforce laws against interracial dating, marriage and adoption, with police, prosecutors, lawyers and judges going to unbelievable lengths to "prove" an individual's race -- stories that would almost be funny if they weren't so cruel and tragic.

The book opens with the awful tale of Jacqueline Henley, a motherless New Orleans toddler whose white relatives surrendered her to the state in 1952, when it became clear, as the child got older and darker-skinned, that her father was black. Henley's story promised to have a happy ending when the black foster family she was placed with decided to adopt her -- until they found they couldn't, because she was listed as white on her birth certificate, and Louisiana law prohibited interracial adoption. Lawyers tried to free the girl from her no-man's land of racial categorization, but failed. The adoption was prohibited. Eventually, though, Henley was adopted by a black Chicago family, when Louisiana officials let her cross state lines to find a home, having made it impossible within its borders.

Anyone familiar with contemporary racial politics knows exactly where Kennedy is going with the Henley story. In 2003, it's painfully clear that outside the Web sites of racist white nutjobs, the only folks obsessing about racial categories, inveighing against racial mixing, advocating race-matching in adoption and preaching racial solidarity tend to be civil rights advocates, mostly but not exclusively black. The NAACP, backed by the Asian Pacific Legal Consortium, opposed the Census Bureau's decision to let Americans check multiple boxes in the 2000 count, afraid the creation of a new multiracial category of Americans would dilute black political power (since, thanks to the history of often involuntary mixing that Kennedy illuminates, the vast majority of blacks have non-black ancestors). The NAACP urged the Census Bureau to designate as black anyone who checked multiple boxes, if one of the boxes was "black" -- a novel update on the pernicious one-drop rule that racists once used to designate anyone with African ancestry black. And while it's black conservative Ward Connerly who is behind the move to abolish the collection of racial data by California agencies, the entire black civil rights establishment is arrayed against him.

Harking back to the plight of Jacqueline Henley, Kennedy points out that today, groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers have worked hard to prevent white parents from adopting black children, calling it a form of "genocide" -- meanwhile leaving black children to languish in foster care, just like Henley did 50 years ago, even when willing white parents are available. Although some critics have complained that the book pays insufficient attention to interracial intimacy beyond the borders of black and white -- which Kennedy admits -- his most scathing chapter is about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which he argues is a pernicious gesture of racial engineering that makes babies of Indian ancestry essentially the property of their tribes, not their parents, with eerie echoes of the plantation system.

I was tempted to argue that Kennedy makes too much of black efforts to enforce racial matching. While such arguments developed enormous sway in the 1970s, the '80s and '90s saw an ideological and political backlash, and by 1996 the Interracial Adoption Act expressly forbade racial matching policies. Still, many states, most notably California, have statutes that permit public workers to consider a prospective parent's "cultural competency" -- a creepy term that's shorthand for whether a parent knows enough about an adoptee's race, culture and ethnicity to raise a healthy, happy child.

You might ask what's wrong with such efforts, until you think about what it means: Who is going to judge what constitutes "competency" to raise a black child? Ward Connerly or Louis Farrakhan? Audrey Edwards or Janet Jackson? Kennedy cites a Rhode Island case in which a white couple's ignorance about Kwanzaa -- a faux-African holiday invented by black nationalist bully and FBI informant Ron Karenga, and ignored by many blacks -- was used against their adoption of a black child. Today, a whole diversity industry trades in what some people might call stereotypes of racial behavior, in the name of cultural competency -- and Kennedy argues that when it comes to adoption, anyway, it's black children who suffer from it.

But if certain racial stereotypes, however well intended, hold too much power when it comes to adoption policy, Kennedy shows that such biases are even more widespread when it comes to interracial dating and marriage. Yet he only touches on another fascinating way in which white racists and black opponents of mixed marriage have traded positions: Now it's blacks who promote the most noxious stereotypes of men and women who mix, in order to stigmatize interracial romance -- and even more intriguing, in these black stereotypes of mixed couples, whites and blacks have switched roles, too.

In the white racist imagination through Jim Crow, of course, blacks were hypersexual and seductive, desired by only the most depraved white men and women, who wanted them for their renowned sexual prowess and nothing more. But today, according to the nouveau black stereotype, white women are the freaks, sexually wild as well as easy, while virtuous black women demand commitment before giving it up -- and even then they stick to an erotic menu that can only be termed vanilla. (The best pop-culture crash-course on these issues is the hilarious 2000 film "The Brothers," in which bachelor Bill Bellamy swore off black women because they're too "demanding" -- and then got his ass kicked by a feisty white girl -- while the married D.H. Hughley spent the movie trying to coax oral sex out of his black wife, who was raised to think it's "nasty.")

Meanwhile, the other half of the stereotype holds that white men who date black women are only into sex, while black men who date white women are chasing not sex but status. (You know, prosperity, not that other P-word.) In a July 1999 Essence piece -- yes, it's Essence again -- on black women who date white men, one source recounts that she wouldn't allow her white date a goodnight kiss because she was afraid his interest was "just about wanting to know what a Black woman looks like naked. Is it just that you want to see my nipples, to see what dark nipples look like?" she wonders. Others worry about the "Makumba-love, bangi-ass fantasy." Conversely, the myth goes, black men today aren't out to rob a white woman of her virtue; they just want her Rolodex, and her daddy's, too. In her Essence essay, Audrey Edwards lamented the perceived tendency of successful black men to marry white, and Kennedy notes that such worries are behind most black disapproval of relationships between white women and black men.

The nastiest version of the myth, however, holds that while those black men believe they're marrying up, they're actually marrying down, almost always choosing white women who are lower class, less well educated -- and unattractive to boot. On that issue the best pop-culture primer remains Spike Lee's iconic "Jungle Fever." Although in interviews Lee has complained about the plague of black men dating "ugly" white women, not just lower-class ones, he cast the gorgeous Annabelle Sciorra as Wesley Snipes' white girlfriend. That's because ugly might make for a useful, stigmatizing racial myth, but it's bad box office, and Spike ain't about socialist realism, anyway. Still, Sciorra's sexy Angie was a working class Italian with a high school education, while Snipes' Flipper Purify -- Purify -- get it? -- and his lovely black wife had graduate degrees. Of course nature intended for Flipper and his wife to wind up back together -- class tells -- and so they do.

Maybe the most radical thing Kennedy does, albeit briefly, is suggest the possibility that the conventional anti-mixing wisdom about successful black men -- they get some money, then they marry white -- sometimes works the other way: Some black men (and black women) may choose white partners, then become successful. And not because they face less racism (in fact they may face more, given lingering prejudice from blacks and whites), but because of the social capital and wider world of connections they acquire with that merger -- and maybe even because of psychological traits that leave them open to finding a white partner.

The paucity of research on these questions is amazing. I saw one intriguing study of 1990 census data showing that in upper-income American marriages (over $100,000), as well as marriages in which both partners have postdoctoral educations, there are almost as many black-white couples as there are couples in which both partners are black -- even though black-white marriages make up only 12 percent of black marriages overall. No one has really looked at what this means. It might simply mean that affluent whites are raising the income level of their black spouses; it might mean successful black men -- and now women -- wind up marrying whites; it might mean racism and other bars to success faced by blacks are reduced if they take a white spouse. But it might also mean that men and women inclined to marry outside their race have other traits -- curiosity? courage? self-confidence? -- that make them materially successful.

We really don't know. But Kennedy approvingly quotes Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's bold pro-integrationist theory that intermixing is a good thing, especially for blacks, because it widens their networks and increases their social capital, as well as that of their offspring. You can see why that's offensive to some African-Americans, who ask: Can't we increase the cultural, social and economic capital of black families? Can't we lower the barriers of racism, so black people who fall in love with other black people have the same advantages as those who love whites?

But social progress may not work that way. Those who are willing to venture out into new worlds and explore frontiers are often rewarded for their courage. And marriage has always been an economic arrangement, in which partners choose one another, and give one another advantages, in ways that have nothing to do with love, even if they only cop to the fairy tale version of coupling.

I think Kennedy overstates the roles that sexual fear and projection, and the threat of racial "mongrelization," have played as the motivation behind racially discriminatory laws. Maintaining economic privilege for whites has always been more important. From slavery to the New York City draft riots to Reconstruction, up through the opposition to welfare, busing and affirmative action that emerged in the 1960s and persists today, the desire to maintain white advantage -- or in the working class, the desire not to face more disadvantage, thanks to competition from another pool of exploitable workers -- has been the force driving most racist laws, and the racial prejudice that survived those laws' repeal. That's why it makes sense that today, the most (publicly) acceptable black critique of intermarriage centers on the fear that the trend will hurt the black community economically, that it's causing an exodus of good black husbands who, choosing white wives, flee to the promised land of integration -- which means whiteness.

When those arguments fail, of course, opponents resort to sexual stereotyping and stigmatizing, name-calling and contempt. But it didn't work for white opponents of intermarriage, and it won't work for their black counterparts. It's wrong, it's racist -- and the drive to mix is just too strong. My advice to women like Edwards who are trying to revive the taboo against interracial dating is simple: Remember Sexuality 101, in which taboo heightens attraction. And I'd also suggest a lesson plan for Sociology 2003: Defining a community by the threats to it is not an appealing vision of community.

As an outsider who's been intimate in the world of blacks and Jews, I can certainly testify from experience that neither approach is working. Of course, Judaism is a religion, not a race (at least the way most people understand the concept), and so it's been possible for some people who worry about Jews intermarrying themselves out of existence to come up with a compromise approach, involving outreach to non-Jewish spouses based on the appeal of Judaism -- its spiritual and cultural traditions of wisdom, justice and comfort in the face of suffering and loss -- rather than just guilt about high rates of Jewish intermarriage. But there's really no comparable black compromise with intermarriage, at least for those with views like Edwards'. An old friend and mentor of mine who worked on black poverty issues used to tell me, "Black is a state of mind," and he welcomed white co-workers, as well as the white girlfriends or husbands of black friends who shared his values, into his vision of community. That's not possible for racial essentialists, who define community by color.

By the end of Kennedy's book, though, unexpectedly I felt a flash of sympathy for Edwards. Because if you insist that no one should ostracize blacks and whites who love one another, you have to have some human sympathy for black women who love black men, and are genuinely pained at the shortage of them. Stanley Crouch's wildly pro-miscegenation novel "Don't the moon look lonesome" actually captured it well, when the tough, screwed-up Cecilia explains why she can't get over wanting a black man -- a man who is the color of the men in her family, the color of childhood, the color of tenderness and love. "All I want in the world is one of those kinds of men I saw what I was just a little kid," Cecilia says. If the heart has its reasons, hers does too. None of us can be blamed for whom we love.

That said, we can't preach racial separatism for one group, and not for everybody. Although the current clamor to revive taboos against interracial dating lacks the force of law -- one thing white supremacists used to have on their side that black mothers like Edwards clearly don't -- it's still the wrong message for a multiracial democracy. And clearly most people understand that. There's no doubt all this is easier for the younger generation. Edwards is in her 50s, Kennedy and I are in our 40s; Essence's target audience seems to reach from our age down into the 30s. In the pages of Africana.com, and other sites that seem more geared toward younger black people, there's a little less angst and a lot more acceptance, by women as well as men.

Still, interracial love can't by itself eradicate racism, and Kennedy admits that. He makes the obligatory nod to Brazil, ground zero of miscegenation, in which everyone mixes and yet somehow, the elite remains white and the underclass is black. But it's too pessimistic to say the U.S. is headed for the same fate -- there's less racial mixing here, but there's more social mobility between classes. Intermarriage could lead to greater social equity here than it has in Brazil. We don't know where this experiment will wind up. But one thing is clear: Interracial intimacy alone won't eliminate racism, but efforts to stigmatize it don't move us forward, and almost certainly set us back. The comfort in reading Kennedy's book lies in its clarity that just like their doomed white forebears, today's opponents of race mixing can't win.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/02/05/mixed/