Reading "Interracial Intimacies" alongside Essence's "Bring me home a black girl," it's hard not to notice the way racist whites and some supposedly enlightened civil rights advocates have traded places. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," wrote the judge who upheld Virginia's ban on interracial marriage in the wonderfully named Loving vs. Commonwealth case (which ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court overturning all such statutes, but not until 1967). "The fact that he separated the races shows he did not intend for the races to mix." Early chapters of Kennedy's book show a long history of bizarre attempts to enforce laws against interracial dating, marriage and adoption, with police, prosecutors, lawyers and judges going to unbelievable lengths to "prove" an individual's race -- stories that would almost be funny if they weren't so cruel and tragic.

The book opens with the awful tale of Jacqueline Henley, a motherless New Orleans toddler whose white relatives surrendered her to the state in 1952, when it became clear, as the child got older and darker-skinned, that her father was black. Henley's story promised to have a happy ending when the black foster family she was placed with decided to adopt her -- until they found they couldn't, because she was listed as white on her birth certificate, and Louisiana law prohibited interracial adoption. Lawyers tried to free the girl from her no-man's land of racial categorization, but failed. The adoption was prohibited. Eventually, though, Henley was adopted by a black Chicago family, when Louisiana officials let her cross state lines to find a home, having made it impossible within its borders.

Anyone familiar with contemporary racial politics knows exactly where Kennedy is going with the Henley story. In 2003, it's painfully clear that outside the Web sites of racist white nutjobs, the only folks obsessing about racial categories, inveighing against racial mixing, advocating race-matching in adoption and preaching racial solidarity tend to be civil rights advocates, mostly but not exclusively black. The NAACP, backed by the Asian Pacific Legal Consortium, opposed the Census Bureau's decision to let Americans check multiple boxes in the 2000 count, afraid the creation of a new multiracial category of Americans would dilute black political power (since, thanks to the history of often involuntary mixing that Kennedy illuminates, the vast majority of blacks have non-black ancestors). The NAACP urged the Census Bureau to designate as black anyone who checked multiple boxes, if one of the boxes was "black" -- a novel update on the pernicious one-drop rule that racists once used to designate anyone with African ancestry black. And while it's black conservative Ward Connerly who is behind the move to abolish the collection of racial data by California agencies, the entire black civil rights establishment is arrayed against him.

Harking back to the plight of Jacqueline Henley, Kennedy points out that today, groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers have worked hard to prevent white parents from adopting black children, calling it a form of "genocide" -- meanwhile leaving black children to languish in foster care, just like Henley did 50 years ago, even when willing white parents are available. Although some critics have complained that the book pays insufficient attention to interracial intimacy beyond the borders of black and white -- which Kennedy admits -- his most scathing chapter is about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which he argues is a pernicious gesture of racial engineering that makes babies of Indian ancestry essentially the property of their tribes, not their parents, with eerie echoes of the plantation system.

I was tempted to argue that Kennedy makes too much of black efforts to enforce racial matching. While such arguments developed enormous sway in the 1970s, the '80s and '90s saw an ideological and political backlash, and by 1996 the Interracial Adoption Act expressly forbade racial matching policies. Still, many states, most notably California, have statutes that permit public workers to consider a prospective parent's "cultural competency" -- a creepy term that's shorthand for whether a parent knows enough about an adoptee's race, culture and ethnicity to raise a healthy, happy child.

You might ask what's wrong with such efforts, until you think about what it means: Who is going to judge what constitutes "competency" to raise a black child? Ward Connerly or Louis Farrakhan? Audrey Edwards or Janet Jackson? Kennedy cites a Rhode Island case in which a white couple's ignorance about Kwanzaa -- a faux-African holiday invented by black nationalist bully and FBI informant Ron Karenga, and ignored by many blacks -- was used against their adoption of a black child. Today, a whole diversity industry trades in what some people might call stereotypes of racial behavior, in the name of cultural competency -- and Kennedy argues that when it comes to adoption, anyway, it's black children who suffer from it.

But if certain racial stereotypes, however well intended, hold too much power when it comes to adoption policy, Kennedy shows that such biases are even more widespread when it comes to interracial dating and marriage. Yet he only touches on another fascinating way in which white racists and black opponents of mixed marriage have traded positions: Now it's blacks who promote the most noxious stereotypes of men and women who mix, in order to stigmatize interracial romance -- and even more intriguing, in these black stereotypes of mixed couples, whites and blacks have switched roles, too.

In the white racist imagination through Jim Crow, of course, blacks were hypersexual and seductive, desired by only the most depraved white men and women, who wanted them for their renowned sexual prowess and nothing more. But today, according to the nouveau black stereotype, white women are the freaks, sexually wild as well as easy, while virtuous black women demand commitment before giving it up -- and even then they stick to an erotic menu that can only be termed vanilla. (The best pop-culture crash-course on these issues is the hilarious 2000 film "The Brothers," in which bachelor Bill Bellamy swore off black women because they're too "demanding" -- and then got his ass kicked by a feisty white girl -- while the married D.H. Hughley spent the movie trying to coax oral sex out of his black wife, who was raised to think it's "nasty.")

Meanwhile, the other half of the stereotype holds that white men who date black women are only into sex, while black men who date white women are chasing not sex but status. (You know, prosperity, not that other P-word.) In a July 1999 Essence piece -- yes, it's Essence again -- on black women who date white men, one source recounts that she wouldn't allow her white date a goodnight kiss because she was afraid his interest was "just about wanting to know what a Black woman looks like naked. Is it just that you want to see my nipples, to see what dark nipples look like?" she wonders. Others worry about the "Makumba-love, bangi-ass fantasy." Conversely, the myth goes, black men today aren't out to rob a white woman of her virtue; they just want her Rolodex, and her daddy's, too. In her Essence essay, Audrey Edwards lamented the perceived tendency of successful black men to marry white, and Kennedy notes that such worries are behind most black disapproval of relationships between white women and black men.

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