Prometheus 6   

This has to be explained?

Race in America
Strom Thurmond's daughter and the enduring taboo on black/white marriages
Kevin R. Johnson
Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

The nation recently learned from the mixed-race daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., that he was her father. Essie Mae Washington- Williams' story is especially intriguing because Thurmond, for much of his political career, was a staunch segregationist and a fierce opponent of civil rights for African Americans.

The truth of the matter is that, as Washington-Williams herself emphasizes, racial mixture long has been a part of the American experience. In the days of slavery, intimate liaisons -- often involuntary -- were common between white men and black women, with the most well-known probably being that between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

Only in 1967, however, did the Supreme Court in the aptly named case of Loving vs. Virginia strike down Virginia's law -- named "An Act to Preserve Racial Purity" -- barring interracial marriages. Before 1967, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' marriage to his white wife would have violated the criminal laws of Virginia, where they now live, and dozens of other states.

The law was not the only thing standing in the way of interracial relationships. In the summer of 1955, Emmitt Till, a young black youth, was lynched for "eyeing" a white woman. For more than a century after the Civil War, "lynch law" served to terrorize African Americans and strongly inhibited interracial relationships.

Times have changed. It no longer is unlawful to marry across the color line. Interracial relationships and marriages are more socially acceptable than in the days of Strom Thurmond's youth. Essie Mae-Washington's story, however, highlights the underside of the ballyhooed "multiracial America." For nearly 80 years, Strom Thurmond kept his mixed-race daughter a secret. The fact that such a public man (he was a senator for 48 years and once ran for president), failed to publicly acknowledge his black daughter (and at times even denied it could even be possible) reveals much about the legacy of the ban on interracial relationships in U.S. society.

Although interracial marriage is not illegal, blacks and whites both still tend to marry within the same race. As Rachel Moran observed in "Interracial Intimacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2001), "Over 93 percent of whites and blacks marry within their own group. . . ." The truth of the matter is that as this statistic shows, black/white intermarriage has increased relatively little over the last 20 years. So why is it that so few whites and African Americans marry? Racial separation in U.S. society offers a partial explanation. Residential and school segregation remains a fact of life in the modern United States. As a result, African Americans and whites often do not interact socially. Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas/Latinos as a whole tend to be less segregated from whites than blacks and, not coincidentally, have much higher intermarriage rates.

But there is more to the story. The legacy of the deep-seated animus toward African Americans in U.S. society inhibits whites from marrying blacks. Anti-black sentiment, as well as residential and school segregation, makes it much less likely that whites will interact socially with, much less marry, African Americans. Black/white relationships still are taboo in some circles. In Alabama in 2000, for instance, 40 percent of the state's voters opposed repealing the state's patently unconstitutional ban on interracial marriage. A few years ago, an African American man accompanied by a white woman was stabbed by a white supremacist in a Missouri restaurant. The racial divide about the infamous O.J. Simpson trial in part stemmed from the fact that Simpson's murdered wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was white. In the early 1990s, an Alabama high school principal threatened to cancel the school's prom upon learning that mixed couples planned to attend. Moreover, as Harvard professor Randall Kennedy has written, some African Americans frown on interracial marriages.

At the individual level, the painful experiences of Washington-Williams, who was embraced by the African American community, show an extreme example of the issue of racial identity faced by mixed-race people in the Unites States. Importantly, she went public not out of any desire for attention but to clear the air and end the years of media speculation about whether Thurmond was her father. Now, Washington-Williams can feel "completely free."

The Strom Thurmond/Essie Mae Washington-Williams controversy should make us think about the nation's racial future. As a society, we should consider what the persistently low rate of interracial marriages between blacks and whites tells us about the status of African Americans in U.S. society. With all the talk of a multiracial America, the taboo on black/white relationships, a legacy of the nation's longtime ban on interracial relationships, continues to exist and represents a lasting monument to slavery and Jim Crow.

Kevin R. Johnson is a professor of law and Chicano/a studies at the University of California at Davis. He has published "How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity" (Temple University Press, 1999) and "Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader" (NYU Press, 2002).