In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a nerve at the center of American society: race relations and our most intimate ties to each other. Writing with the same piercing intelligence he brought to his national bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Kennedy here challenges us to examine how prejudices and biases still fuel fears and inform our sexual, marital, and family choices.
Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America's racial dynamics, Kennedy takes us from the injustices of the slave era up to present-day battles over race matching adoption policies, which seek to pair children with adults of the same race. He tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics, the historic role of legal institutions in policing racial boundaries, and the real and imagined pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy. A bracing, much-needed look at the way we have lived in the past, Interracial Intimacies is also a hopeful book, offering a potent vision of our future as a multiracial democracy.
Slavery constituted the principal backdrop against which whites and black encountered one another for over two hundred years, from the 1660s to the 1860s. The overwhelming majority of slave owners were white, and the overwhelming majority of slaves black. There was probably more black-white sex during this period than at any other time (thus far) in American history. Most of it was unwanted sex, stemming from white males' exploitation of black women-the subject of many pages to come? But what about mutually desired sex or what I refer to as sexual intimacy? Some commentators insist that there can have been no such thing as sexual intimacy between a black enslaved woman and any white man-a slave owner or overseer or even a mere stranger-because mutually desired sex requires choice, a power denied to slaves by bondage. According to this view, slavery created an extreme dependency that precluded the possibility of chosen as opposed to unwanted sex. As a result, all of the sex that took place between enslaved women and white men constituted some form of sexual assault. Professor Angela Davis is among those who make this argument. Criticizing the notion that a slave woman could consent to have sex with a master, Davis maintains that "there could hardly be a basis for 'delight, affection and love' as long as white men, by virtue of their economic position, had unlimited access to Black women's bodies." Proponents of this view are right to stress the cruel coerciveness of slavery. While the specifics of bondage varied widely over time and from place to place, the condition itself always endowed masters with despotic personal power over their human property.
