Spanning the long century between the 1860s – when the word “miscegenation,” from miscere (to mix) and genus (species) came into popular usage [7] and the watershed Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, Pascoe draws together legal theory, court testimony, oral history, and media archives to show the long and complicated history of miscegenation law in the U.S, and to give a sense of the vast range of people whose lives were affected by these oppressive legislative acts.
Part one examines the ways in which early American modes of citizenship were tied to gender and sexuality, and shows how the scandal of “illicit sex” between races became a hot-button issue in the Civil War and reconstruction periods, following the abolition of slavery.
[8] Part two looks at how the government surveilled, managed, and restricted such “illicit” relationships through legislation that criminalized marriage between people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds, while the third section of the book explores how resistance movements of the 1960s opposed these discriminatory acts, culminating in the Loving v. Virginia trial.
The section of the book mounts a critique of the colorblind logic that has tended to dominate contemporary liberal discourse on race and interracial intimacy since Loving, despite the persistence of racism in American culture at large.
Along with their race-generative paradigm, CRT scholars crafted a critique of liberalism to assess the problems of the so-called gains of the civil rights movement like affirmative action and color-blindness.
Employing the CRT paradigm, Pascoe recast miscegenation law to argue that it was not simply an affront to individuals’ right to marry who they wanted.
Furthermore, the legislators and legal practitioners reflexive reference to racial categories in the laws, opinions, and court battles naturalized whiteness, blackness, and other constructions demarcated as races.
[17] In 2009, Pascoe received a Martin Luther King Jr. award from the University of Oregon for her work in promoting diversity and social equality on campus.