Interracial Marriage

The concept of interracial marriage, previously referred to as “miscegenation,” relies on the notion created in the 15th and 16th centuries in Inquisition-era Spain that human beings can be separated into different races. As they expelled non-Christians from Europe, Spaniards employed these meanings to marriage and family formation both at home and in the Americas as they conquered indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and built colonial settlements. In what became the United States, European colonizers and their White descendants shaped law and society to expand or contract the rights of interracial couples and their descendants. Notwithstanding, interracial couples and their descendants reacted to the racial status quo to form the partnerships and families they desired. One of the major social functions of marriage is to determine inheritance and property rights. Throughout history, formal or legal marriage was often reserved for elites within a given society. Although enslaved Africans and their descendants were able to marry at the discretion of their masters, these relationships were legally binding depending on how the law saw enslaved people. Within Anglo-America, enslaved people were seen as property and could not marry; in Spanish and French America, under the influence of the Catholic Church, the enslaved were seen as having souls and could indeed marry. Becoming incorporated as a slave state into the post-independence United States (i.e., Florida, Louisiana) meant that enslaved people lost this ability to marry. White men often sexually assaulted the Black women they enslaved and forced them to give birth to children who increased their wealth and were part of the property that could be inherited or passed down to heirs. For these reasons, master-slave intimacies lie outside the scope of a marital union. At the same time, throughout US history, White men also engaged in a variety of marital unions with free Black women. These included formal religious or state-sanctioned marriage, cohabitation, and even concubinage across racial lines. Jim Crow laws made formal intermarriage illegal. This review provides a starting point for those interested in interracial marriage in the United States and beyond, with discussion of its social and legal history, perspectives on their meaning in society, contemporary realities of people in and affected by interracial marriages, and future directions in examining interracial marriage.