Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption [Hardcover]

Randall Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0375402551 | ISBN-13: 978-0375402555 | Publication Date: January 7, 2003 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Does a biracial child from Louisiana belong with the black family who wants to adopt her or in the indifferent foster care system that has classified her as white? Kennedy, who created a media storm with Nigger, begins his third book about race with an obscure 1952 legal case that addresses this question, then traces the customs, laws and myths surrounding interracial relationships that came before and after it. As in Nigger, Kennedy's controversial examination of the taboo word, much of this book centers on legal actions and court rulings. It is laced with enough anecdotes and pop culture references, however, to make it an accessible, compelling read for anyone. The Harvard law professor even wrote to people who placed what he calls "racially discriminatory" personal ads (SWM seeks SWF, for example), asking them to explain themselves (few did). For the most part, the book stays focused on black and white relationships, and Kennedy dutifully but unremarkably covers well-known examples such as the slavery era's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the 20th century's O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson. He is at his best and most instructive tackling issues like racial passing (he devotes an entire chapter to a mid-20th-century interracial couple and their daughter's Imitation of Life-like attempts to pass for white) and interracial adoption (he deplores race matching as "a destructive practice in all its various guises"). While Kennedy points out that race relations have made huge strides since the 1952 Louisiana adoption case, he also openly conveys his disappointment at how America remains "a pigmentocracy" influenced by white supremacist notions. The book provides plenty of examples to back up this assertion, but stops short of offering tangible solutions.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A Harvard law professor and the author of, most recently, Nigger [BKL F 15 02], Kennedy offers a brilliant analysis of one the most controversial areas of American race relations--interracial sex. Kennedy weaves together history, law, literature, politics, and social policy in a searing examination of how blacks and whites have intermixed since Africans were brought to the U.S. as slaves. Beginning with the rape and sexual exploitation of black women by white men, Kennedy examines the underlying myths and stereotypes that have shaped social policy on marriage, identity, and adoption and given rise to the convoluted legal and social structure meant to maintain the racial hierarchy. He explores the social context of famous black-white relationships, from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, through boxing champion Jack Johnson's marriages to white women, to the Loving v. Virginia U.S. Supreme Court case that outlawed bans on interracial marriage. In addition, Kennedy examines the image of black men as sexual predators bent on raping white women, a charge used to incite lynching. Kennedy also details the nation's shameful history of racial classification and the phenomenon of racial passing as portrayed in movies and literature and as practiced in real life. A comprehensive, well-researched look at the intersection of race and sex in the U.S. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 688 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375402551
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402555
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #928,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Content With Character, February 16, 2003

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (Hardcover)

Randall Kennedy's Interracial Intimacies is many things: well-written, well-researched, revealing, disturbing, detailed, and hopeful. Kennedy, a Yale-trained lawyer, a professor at Harvard Law, and the author of the books Race, Crime, and the Law, and Nigger, once again focuses on race and the law as he weaves his way through the topics of interracial sex, marriage, identity, and adoption. Right from the first case, an adoption involving a mixed-race child presented in the Introduction, the reader is introduced to some truly baroque and rococo thinking on the part of often well-meaning people. Kennedy goes where the available evidence leads and writes things that many readers and reviewers will find politically incorrect [e.g., some intimate slave-master relationships were loving; black adults may not always be the best adoptive parents for a black child]. This attention to empirical evidence makes Kennedy a champion in my mind; I truly dislike it when somebody tries to pass off a personal or political agenda as the best answer without presenting any supporting evidence. Even though not the main reason for reading this book [I fell in love with Kennedy's writing when I read Nigger], the following story from my life illustrates one of many reasons why Kennedy's book is relevant to everybody, including a middle-class white guy like me. Back in the '70s, I attended a predominantly white high school in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In my Junior year, I fell in love with the younger sister of a friend of mine. The friend and her sister where first generation Americans and Chinese by descent. I found out in sometimes not-so-subtle ways that being friends with an asian-american and loving one were very different issues. One of my friends concluded what he wrote in my Junior yearbook with a statement that any children I had with my girlfriend would end up being "Red haired big nosed chinks -shame-." That relationship broke up because of the reasons most high school romances end - his going away to college, her parents don't like him, his behavior, while often exemplary compared to his peers, is still pretty insensitive at times - but I'm proud to say that the relationship ended as it began, without race being an issue for the two of us. My only complaint about the book, and it's a small one, is that there are more typos than there ought to be in a book of this caliber [due to the fact, perhaps, that spellcheck programs check for words that are spelled correctly, whether they are used correctly or not]. I share Kennedy's vision of a society that truly deals with every person as an individual. I highly recommend Interracial Intimacies.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read, just as brilliant and intriguing as Nigger, January 27, 2003

By 

Kyra W (Hampton U) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (Hardcover)

I'm a poor college kid and I spent the last ounce of my money buying this book! Believe me, it has been totally worth it. Interracial Intimacies has been just as enjoyable as last year's "Nigger", and I recommend that every person in America, black or white, mixed or "not" read this book. Wither you are in an interracial relationship or not, this book will shed light on a culture and an acceptable way of life that has now seriously become mainstream. (Those who *are* in an interracial relationship will further appreciate the times we live in) Those who read this book will learn something new with the turn of every page. It is very well written, comprehensive, and full of facts and interesting experiances in history that all people should know. I look forward to the next great book!

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A painfully beautiful book, September 10, 2003

By 

Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (Hardcover)

The author pulls the mirror up to our faces and makes us confront our own prejudices today and mourn our prejudices of the past. Of all the things I come away with in this book, I wholeheartedly support the author in his view that race matching in adoption is a destructive practice in all its various guises. Yes, 'it ought to be replaced by a system under which children in need of homes may be assigned to the care of foster or adoptive parents as quickly as reasonably possible.' We have several couples in our neighborhood who have adopted children of other races, and two black children are among them. This is real progress.

Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?