With books titled "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" and "Race, Crime and the Law" to his credit, it should come as no surprise that Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy's comments during a Community Dinner at the Roth Center yesterday centered around a controversial topic -- marital and sexual relations between people of different races.
Kennedy's most recent book, "Interracial Intimacies," examines the complicated issues surrounding cross-racial relationships. To demonstrate the impact of past views regarding such relationships, Kennedy opened his speech with a theoretical question.
Civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. became seriously involved with a white woman while he attended seminary in Pennsylvania, Kennedy said. He then asked the audience of students, faculty and community members to consider what might have happened if King had chosen to marry the woman.
"His life would have been fundamentally changed," Kennedy said. "He wouldn't have been able to return to the South."
King would have been prevented, Kennedy argued, by the presence of laws that specifically prohibited cross-race marriages. These so-called "anti-miscegenation" laws made unions between people of different races a criminal violation, and some even prohibited already-married mixed-race couples from settling in the state.
Laws prohibiting interracial relations are some of the nation's oldest racial regulations, Kennedy said, dating back to the 18th century. They were also among the last to be invalidated " it was not until 1967 that a Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, resulted in the overturn of laws against marriages because of racial classification.
Kennedy said that the laws served to maintain America's "whiteness," fueled by notions that people of color would "taint" white people and that those of mixed racial parentage were somehow inferior.
"If you want to create a white man's country, a nation where power and prestige are monopolized by whites," Kennedy said, "a way to advance that aim is to police a race line."
Interracial intimacy has been a "specter" for both blacks and whites, he said. During the civil rights movement, many whites believed that arguments for equality masked a "hankering" for intimacy with whites, and blacks were hostile to the idea also, according to Kennedy.
He cited historical black leaders who were ostracized by the black community after marrying whites, such as Frederick Douglass and 1940s NAACP secretary Walter White.
"There have been anxieties all around," Kennedy said.
Anxieties have not yet dissipated, either, even though interracial marriages are now legal. Despite the 1967 ruling, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama retained embedded clauses within their state constitutions dealing with interracial marriage, Kennedy said, until 10 years ago.
Today, censure of mixed marriages is not confined only to black/white unions, he said, citing a colleague who published a book on attitudes within the Jewish community about marrying outside of the faith.
"The issue of out-group marriage is a very hot topic," Kennedy said.
Despite negative attitudes, there has been an increase in interracial marriages during recent years, Kennedy said. He noted, however, that this increase is much larger between other groups than between blacks and whites, a fact he attributes to the historical precedent of the particular relations between the two races.
"Black-white marriages cause so much more anxiety," he said.
In response to a question by an audience member who asked whether Kennedy has studied the issue of interracial intimacy in other nations, he mentioned similar restrictions in Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid.
"Nazi Germany even sent agents to the American South to study racial segregation policies," Kennedy said. "What they learned was used when Hitler crafted the Nuremberg laws."
Marital restrictions also existed for foreign immigrants to America that were related to those prohibiting marriages between blacks and whites. Women who married foreigners from certain countries lost their US citizenship, Kennedy said, and Irish and Chinese immigrants were increasingly likened to blacks.
"There was a time when marriage between an Italian and an Irish person was considered a mixed marriage," Kennedy said. "There was a case in Mississippi where an African"American man and a Sicilian woman were on trial for violating race laws, and the case was overturned when the jury ruled that she was colored."
Audience members also had questions regarding interracial relations other than marital and sexual ones, leading to a discussion of friendships and adoptions of children across racial lines.
Kennedy, who is a graduate of Princeton and holds a law degree from Yale, said that he has lobbied for legislation prohibiting the practice of race matching in adoption -- giving legal preference to prospective parents of the same race as the adoptive child. Although such legal preference is no longer permitted, it is still a common practice.
His book deals with the subject of interracial adoption, an "area of the book I am criticized for," Kennedy said, recalling a New York Times Book Review article that termed him "shrill" on the subject.
He believes that securing a parent who cares for the child is more important than matching children with parents of a similar race.
The existence of prejudice against interracial relations is not a cause for despair, Kennedy said. American society is "amenable to persistent action," he believes.
"Hope is the oxygen for intelligent public action," Kennedy said.
