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Depression

Miscegenation
By Jeremy M Yancey

In the years immediately after the Civil War, the South faced a racial crisis. The rigid lines between the races that slavery had maintained by marking blacks as undeniably subordinate and inferior were called into question, first through emancipation and then through Reconstruction. Racial inferiority and the connection between interracial sexual relationships and white supremacy had not existed in a single unchanging form over the years, but slavery had set the boundaries for these relationships. White patriarchy had defined the authority and responsibility of white men, the subordination and rights to protection for white women, and the gendered forms of subordination to which slaves and free blacks were subject. Martha Hodges's study of relationships between white women and black men suggests that an initial tentative tolerance for such relationships gradually gave way to disapproval, intolerance, and ultimately to nearly total repression in the immediate postbellum era. Under slavery, while such transgressions violated the established systems of racial subordination and patriarchy, they did not ultimately threaten the systems themselves.
The North's victory in the war and the emancipation of the slaves disrupted the repressive modus Vivendi by eliminating slavery as a legal status that maintained most blacks' structural subordination. The white South had to develop new means of linking whiteness to superior status, rights, and authority in both the legal and social realms. This goal was achieved by establishing a rigid division between white and black through the prevention of any black incursions across a newly defined color line. In the matter of interracial sex, the southern states thus took over the task of direct patriarchal control previously left in the hands of individuals. Even after the key questions of the constitutionality of legal racial separation were eventually settled in favor of white supremacy in the...