Coined during the 1864 U.S. presidential campaign, the term “miscegenation” signaled freshened hostilities in the politics of white supremacy. It added a sense of popular horror to “amalgamation,” the old term for racial interbreeding. Remonstrating against emancipating blacks, it invoked cudgels of social control and in explicit racial terms urged extending barriers slavery had safely maintained. It pointedly maligned interracial coupling. It labeled interracial sex as perverted. It cast interracial marriage as an injury to public morals and a detriment to social development. It stigmatized the acts, the actors, and their offspring.

Launched to valorize and vindicate white supremacy, the miscegenation campaign grew in the 1860s to venerate race as an essential barrier ordained by what America's founding Declaration termed “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.” Consecrating the asserted self-evident truth of necessary racial purity, adherents to a cant of social integrity insisted on man-made law dictating who could and could not cohabit, mate, or wed. The growing crusade further implicated law in the most intimate of personal relations and fostered state bureaucracies to police essential elements of personal identity and interpersonal and intergenerational relations.

Historian Peggy Pascoe traces the rise, reach, rationale, and fall of miscegenation laws across the United States. After introducing early American anti-amalgamation practices, she centers on the 1860s to the 1960s. Using personal stories from local cases, she expertly details the wide reach of miscegenation law. Indeed, she moves well beyond the South, where most studies have tended to focus. She illustrates how in many ways Indiana and other Midwestern states led the way in outlawing and prosecuting interracial sex and marriage before and after the 1860s. She shows also how by 1900 nearly all the states of the U.S. West had miscegenation statutes, and she demonstrates how such legislation facilitated larger white supremacy projects.

With richly nuanced contexts, Pascoe's nine chapters deftly unpack cultural assumptions about white supremacy and the nature of race embedded in the national and multiracial project of miscegenation laws. More than black-and-white thrusts extended a dichotomous framework to elevate and separate whites from all others, she shows. The miscegenation crusade entrenched place-specific hierarchies and seized far-reaching racial, sexual, and gender controls. It took on an expansive life in the law.

Insightfully revealing the dimensions and deployment of a taboo, Pascoe exposes how the stigmatizing power of prejudicial moral judgments served to promote and protect laws against interracial sex—especially in constraining white women. Conjuring up deep-seated biases, the miscegenation crusade cast its vision in terms of what was morally and socially proper, respectable, and responsible. It succeeded to such a degree that most Americans long appeared to accept bars against miscegenation as common-sense decency.

As late as the 1960s, even the NAACP, the foremost opponent of such legislation, shied from any hint of being pro-miscegenation. Nicely mapping innovative legal assaults against miscegenation statutes, Pascoe extends beyond the NAACP to wide-ranging opposition. She especially highlights the work of the Los Angeles Catholic Interracial Council (LACIC), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She underscores how such groups worked, like the NAACP, to oppose miscegenation laws without endorsing interracial coupling.

Pascoe's powerful analysis advances beyond the politics of narrow civil rights and the tenets of liberal or romantic individualism. Her argument convincingly encompasses more than tragic denial of personal choices and rights; it pierces to the heart of state power over sex, gender, family formation and, ultimately, personal identity and performance. She presses beyond the landmark 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down miscegenation statutes as violating fundamental freedoms protected under Constitutional due process and equal protection of the laws.

The Loving decision hardly ended the underlying struggle, Pascoe explains. Only in 2000 did Alabama become the final state to rescind miscegenation provisions. The popular power that produced miscegenation laws to further privilege whites and whiteness has hardly disappeared, she argues. It etched an intricate design in the U.S. administrative state that has continued to dictate definitions of marriage, gender, and sexuality, deciding whom law recognizes as wed to whom or eligible to wed whom. It has also inflected discourse on the shape and substance of the so-called color-blind, multicultural, postrace or raceless U.S. society. Such labels, she argues, mask pernicious arbitrary branding that persists in producing and pairing stigmatized race, gender, and family stereotypes.

Pascoe nicely teases out tensions among multiple, warring cultures that continue to block perspectives on persisting practical and theoretical questions of authority, identity, and individuality at the core of historical and legal discourse about marriage, whether interracial or otherwise “mixed.” Her readable, meticulous, engaging, and comprehensive history of contingent and contested intercultural social constructions and interconnections of gender, race relations, personal identity, and the law should become a long-standing reference.