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A review by lkedzie
Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South by Kathryn Schumaker
5.0
"If we are bringing out skeletons, how about let's bring out some about your folks?"
The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. True, but whiggish, where we start at zero justice, ending up somewhere over nine thousand, with progress visible in the aggregate.
This is how we think of interracial marriage. The conventional view would be something like: while slavery, then segregation, kept white and Black from forming romantic unions, after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision, which overturned state laws against interracial marriage, it was first permitted, then accepted, and is now so ordinary as to be not noteworthy.
How this story is wrong as to contemporary society exceeds the scope of a book review, but this book is about how it is wrong historically. The author looks at interracial marriages in the State of Mississippi, starting before the American Civil War and moving chronologically through until just prior to Loving. There is a focus on the courts, in criminal cases, but also will fights and inheritance disputes. In fact, one of the books missteps is that it sometimes seems to shift in thesis to one arguing that it is all about money. While in evidence, it is somewhat reductive and risks falling into the economic anxiety or internal colonialism courses of argumentation, which I think takes away from the real heft of the book.
The history that the author reveals is likely to shift your view, regardless of that view. Starting with what seem to be like love matches between enslaved Black and white people during legal slavery, the topic of how to accommodate interracial marriages was a going concern from Reconstruction onward. The picture that the author draws is of a train-wreck of values, as citizens, lawmen, and legislators try and compromise over something that, by definition, cannot just affect one race, so cannot impinge on the rights of Blacks without doing so also to the rights of whites, not to mention trying to do the same between genders. Trying to come up with rules around races is full of fail, when no one can wholly decide how to apply this social construct to real people, and includes the sort of math around blood quantum that seems like a particularly bleak Monty Python bit.
It is not until the 20th century, influenced by eugenics, that we see narrow and stringent laws enacted and enforced. The whole project of prohibition here is where the Lost Cause mythos has poisoned the facts into assuming a more narrow and implied racist thinking about the past. The good guys may bear some of the burden: it is easy to get into dualistic thinking. But to admit the facts as presented here is to reeeallly show the flimsiness of white supremacy as a concept. If people can bounce in and out of racial attributions, depending on what else is going on, if admixture is pervasive, if interracial relationships are met by the community with a shrug that only becomes an admonition when there is something else on the line, what even is race? It undoes the whole attempted science and is a call coming from inside the house because even if you callously disregard Black equality the ways this impacts on white behavior and identity is unsustainable.
The writing is good. The book passed the citation test in that I did not fall into a rabbit hole whenever I had a question about something. Its only limitation is its specific geographic scope. This is a reasonable limitation, and suggests the lines of further research, but it creates some wariness about the range of the application. Last, I predict that some podcaster is going to make their bones popularizing the Sims case.
My thanks to the author, Kathryn Schumaker, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.
The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. True, but whiggish, where we start at zero justice, ending up somewhere over nine thousand, with progress visible in the aggregate.
This is how we think of interracial marriage. The conventional view would be something like: while slavery, then segregation, kept white and Black from forming romantic unions, after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision, which overturned state laws against interracial marriage, it was first permitted, then accepted, and is now so ordinary as to be not noteworthy.
How this story is wrong as to contemporary society exceeds the scope of a book review, but this book is about how it is wrong historically. The author looks at interracial marriages in the State of Mississippi, starting before the American Civil War and moving chronologically through until just prior to Loving. There is a focus on the courts, in criminal cases, but also will fights and inheritance disputes. In fact, one of the books missteps is that it sometimes seems to shift in thesis to one arguing that it is all about money. While in evidence, it is somewhat reductive and risks falling into the economic anxiety or internal colonialism courses of argumentation, which I think takes away from the real heft of the book.
The history that the author reveals is likely to shift your view, regardless of that view. Starting with what seem to be like love matches between enslaved Black and white people during legal slavery, the topic of how to accommodate interracial marriages was a going concern from Reconstruction onward. The picture that the author draws is of a train-wreck of values, as citizens, lawmen, and legislators try and compromise over something that, by definition, cannot just affect one race, so cannot impinge on the rights of Blacks without doing so also to the rights of whites, not to mention trying to do the same between genders. Trying to come up with rules around races is full of fail, when no one can wholly decide how to apply this social construct to real people, and includes the sort of math around blood quantum that seems like a particularly bleak Monty Python bit.
It is not until the 20th century, influenced by eugenics, that we see narrow and stringent laws enacted and enforced. The whole project of prohibition here is where the Lost Cause mythos has poisoned the facts into assuming a more narrow and implied racist thinking about the past. The good guys may bear some of the burden: it is easy to get into dualistic thinking. But to admit the facts as presented here is to reeeallly show the flimsiness of white supremacy as a concept. If people can bounce in and out of racial attributions, depending on what else is going on, if admixture is pervasive, if interracial relationships are met by the community with a shrug that only becomes an admonition when there is something else on the line, what even is race? It undoes the whole attempted science and is a call coming from inside the house because even if you callously disregard Black equality the ways this impacts on white behavior and identity is unsustainable.
The writing is good. The book passed the citation test in that I did not fall into a rabbit hole whenever I had a question about something. Its only limitation is its specific geographic scope. This is a reasonable limitation, and suggests the lines of further research, but it creates some wariness about the range of the application. Last, I predict that some podcaster is going to make their bones popularizing the Sims case.
My thanks to the author, Kathryn Schumaker, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.