Interracial Intimacies

From the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and Race, Crime, and the Law a tour de force about the controversial issue of personal interracial intimacy as it exists within ever-changing American social mores and within the rule of law. Fears of transgressive interracial relationships, informed over the centuries by ugly racial biases and fantasies, still linger in American society today. This brilliant study ranging from plantation days to the present explores the historical, sociological, legal, and moral issues that continue to feed and complicate that fear. In chapters filled with provocative and cleanly stated logic and enhanced by intriguing historical anecdotes, Randall Kennedy tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics and of race in sexual politics, the prominence of legal institutions in defining racial distinction and policing racial boundaries, the imagined and real pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy, and the competing arguments around interracial romance, sex, and family life throughout American history. In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy offers nothing less than a bracing, much-needed ethic of multiracial living.