Abstract

Uncommon Ground

The author argues that fears about interracial relationships persist in America. Antimiscegenation was outlawed in 1967, but the degree to which those underlying attitudes and fears assert themselves even to this day is sometimes hard to see.When Essie Mae Washington-Williams stepped forward and revealed that she was Strom Thurmond's daughter, the very first news accounts almost universally described her as "a black woman" who claimed to be his daughter. Once his family admitted the relationship, however, she quickly became "mixed-race," specifically "half-black" or "biracial." It's worth looking at the hidden layers of meaning behind the quietly polarizing category of "biracial": It seems to be emerging as a term reserved for those who are the product of recent rather than historical unions between one socially "black" parent and one socially "white" parent, and where the white parent acknowledges the child, either by marriage or--as with the Thurmond family--by admission. These days, interracial relationships are permitted under Georgia law, but the legacy of the old statute is apparently still at work.