Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America.

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. By Renee C. Romano. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 368. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01033-7.)

Renee C. Romano's Race Mixing is an imaginative "marriage" of sociology and history. The book argues that mainstream America has shifted its position on interracial marriage from overt hostility to benign tolerance over the past sixty years. She analyzes the major public events that altered the racial landscape in the United States since World War II through the private experiences of the individuals most affected by these changes: black and white interracial couples. By placing interracial marriage at the center of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, Romano offers a fresh interpretation not only of these developments but also of the social and cultural changes that contributed to the slow erosion of white hostility to one of America's most profound taboos.

Black soldiers returned stateside with wives of European ancestry, igniting a firestorm that challenged statutes and social custom. Interracial marriages forced individual Americans, both black and white, to scrutinize their own beliefs. While Americans were grappling with this divisive issue, their attitudes both altered and were altered by the cultural, social, and political developments of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Romano convincingly argues that social forces created by the counter-cultural Beat generation and the free love movement, white teenagers' embrace of black music, representations of interracial love in popular culture, and the black/white alliances of the civil rights movement converged to soften whites' attitudes toward blacks and interracial marriage. However, a black backlash against interracial marriage occurred with the advent of the Black Power movement in the 1970s. Despite opposition, black-white interracial marriage increased in the subsequent decades, though it lags behind the number of interracial marriages between whites and other ethnic minorities today. Romano concludes that increased acceptance of interracial marriage is not indicative of racism's demise. Rather, she asserts, institutional and structural racism still exists. Yet she remains hopeful that an increase in these marriages will occur once the "Old hierarchies" that cause racial inequalities are dismantled (p. 295).

Race Mixing brilliantly links the public realm of international and national political, social, and cultural developments that affected race in the U.S. to the very private world of intimate relations across the color line. The anecdotal personal accounts that pepper the narrative, Romano's balanced approach to race relations, and her use of examples from popular culture to gauge the changing racial barometer in the mainstream all strengthen the narrative. Romano's exhaustive research draws on archives, newspapers, magazines, film, literature, personal interviews, and sociological case studies, as well as relevant secondary sources. However, in light of her conclusion about dismantling old hierarchies, the absence of a black feminist voice--of bell hooks or Angela Davis, for example--is disturbing. Because of this oversight, Romano reduces black women's continued opposition to black male-white female unions to mere competition for mates, rather than characterizing it as a visceral reaction to the intense feelings of devaluation these unions inspire in some black women. Furthermore, an examination of black feminist social and cultural criticism would have solidly supported her conclusion. Despite this oversight, Race Mixing is a meaningful and important scholarly addition to the growing historiography on this once-unmentionable subject.

Morgan State University 

LISA Y. KING