Interracial Intimacies.

by Randall Kennedy Pantheon, January 2003 $30.00, ISBN 0-375-70184-2

Forget about sex. Until 1967 it was illegal in Virginia for a black person and a white person to share a room after dark. Yet interracial sex--forced and consensual--became a staple of life in Virginia virtually upon the inception of African presence there. This is one of the contradictions and hypocrisies that Randall Kennedy attempts to untangle in Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.

One year after his bold study, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy's newest book is another challenging set of arguments about the most taboo and critical issues affecting race relations in the United States. His premise is based on common sense: Until Americans confront racial bias in the most intimate arenas of their lives, we will continue to live with racism and its consequences.

Interracial Intimacies is strongest as a compelling and thorough sourcebook on the multiple ways in which Americans have historically crossed racial borders in their professional, social and personal lives. In general, Kennedy is interested in attempts by the law to account for and establish boundaries around American racial interactions since the era of slavery until the present. In the first half of his book, Kennedy repeatedly points out how dramatically the law has failed to thwart the determination of those who have desired relationships across racial lines. There is something hopeful in Kennedy's historical accounts. In spite of the law and the racist hierarchies it upheld, some individuals managed to maintain honorable and nuanced relationships with people they were legally forbidden to approach as equals. Kennedy effectively and meaningfully demonstrates how the system of slavery failed to completely dehumanize blacks and whites in this regard. At the same time, he finds grave and compelling evidence that the devastating effects of slavery are part of the fabric of interracial and intraracial interactions even today.

Kennedy uses numerous legal cases to bolster his arguments, and their details are sometimes as tedious as they are provocative. In addition, literature, film, biography and mainstream journalism make appearances on the vast landscape of this book. Some readers will find his shifts across different genres abrupt and problematic, but an implicit argument of Interracial Intimacies is that the boundaries that define these genres, and the disciplines of criticism that surround them, are no more natural than the boundaries that purportedly fix American racial categories. Those who spend too much time bemoaning Kennedy's disciplinary transgressions may well miss the exciting and innovative connections with which this book challenges its readers.

Kennedy saves his heavy artillery for the substantial portion of his book that deals with interracial families, in particular, interracial adoption. Identifying himself as "a liberal individualist who yearns for a society in which race has become obsolete as a significant social marker" Kennedy is opposed to race matching in adoption placements. Finally, he believes that it is a questionable contention at best to suggest that black families are naturally equipped to instill in black children racial and cultural pride. Conversely, why do we assume that white adoptive parents are uniformly destructive to individual black psyches and to a collective black community spirit? There is no reason why multiracial families would not provide a fertile soil for the nurturance of leaders in a new generation of black cultural and political struggles and achievement.

Interracial Intimacies is a passionate, thought-provoking and sobering vision of interracial unions in America's past and present. Kennedy reminds us that while our voting, educational and work practices may impact the racial imbalance in our society, radical transformation will happen as the result of our most basic choices: the men, women and children we choose to love.

--Emily Bernard is the editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and an assistant professor at the Univ. of Vermont.