Renee C. Romano. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America.

Renee C. Romano. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 368 pp. $35.00.

Following its release in 2002, Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes's film about interracial love in the white suburbs of 1950s' Connecticut, received widespread if not unanimous acclaim. Many critics praised Haynes's pastiche of 1950s' Hollywood cinema, extolling the beauty of its photography, the restraint of its cast's performances, and the economy of its dialogue. For all its technical accomplishments, however, Far From Heaven remains a very ambiguous film. Like Pleasantville (1998), although it is more directly engaged with interracial love, it can be read in two different ways. On one level, it can be seen as a simple act of national self-congratulation, which voices relief and satisfaction that, since the compulsory conformism of the 1950s, American society has successfully completed certain necessary--if belated--social, political, and cultural reforms. In other ways, however, Far From Heaven resists such a simple interpretation. The fact that the film is set in Hartford, Connecticut, suggests that its concerns lie not with the overt racial hatred often associated with the contemporary white South, but with subtler forms of prejudice, perhaps even with a disjunction between liberal rhetoric and lived reality more redolent of America since the Civil Rights Acts. Similarly, while Far From Heaven's pastiche of 1950s' Hollywood reminds us that an interracial relationship is no longer a cinematic impossibility, we cannot escape the fact that this relationship remains unconsummated, as chaste as that between Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Far From Heaven thus expresses profound ambivalence about the state of American society in the twenty-first century. Although some might accuse the film of political complacency, others might argue that, chiefly, it celebrates America's undeniable recent social advances in order to shore such progress up against the increasingly vociferous proclamations of a resurgent right wing that is characterized, among other things, by its nostalgic attitude toward the 1950s.

A certain ambivalence about the state of America today also distinguishes Renee C. Romano's Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America, which takes recent poll findings suggesting the end of the interracial taboo with a necessary pinch of salt. Throughout her cogent and extremely readable history of interracial love and marriage since 1940--which begins at a period, still well within living memory, when such relationships remained illegal in much of America--Romano consistently avoids straightforward liberal triumphalism and remains admirably tentative about drawing sweeping conclusions from her data. As befits its status as a work of scholarship, however, Race Mixing's ambivalence on this issue is of a more ordered and theorized kind than is Far From Heaven's--it is shown, far more clearly, to reside in the issue itself rather than in Romano's treatment of it. As Romano argues, for all the "strides" American society has made "in lessening the taboo against interracial relationships," this taboo--has been "eroded" rather than "erased." Endorsing Far From Heaven's apparent concern with social hypocrisy, Romano notes that even the erosion of this taboo--though clearly the cause for social celebration--has not led to the erosion of deeper forms of racial inequality, particularly those in the economic sphere. In a lament that finds echoes in many other recent academic interventions--in recent critical interrogations of the increasing commercial success and cultural ubiquity of hip-hop, for example--Romano's discussion identifies the growing cultural acceptability of interracial marriage as a further sign of the lack of any correlation between public rhetoric and such more sturdy measures of racial equality as life expectancy, income levels, or educational achievement. As she argues in her persuasive conclusion, "racial inequalities ... remain" and "old hierarchies must be dismantled for new attitudes about interracial love and marriage to flourish." Taboos may be eroded, challenged, and destroyed, Romano suggests; but they must also be replaced by more than mere absence. New attitudes, including new attitudes towards race itself, must emerge if America is not to relapse into the pseudoscientific racial classifications of the past.

Although it will be of interest to both, this book will satisfy the social scientist far more than the cultural analyst. Like many works of social history--e.g., Leon F. Litwack's panoramic histories of black life in the South, Been in the Storm So Long (1979) and Trouble in Mind (1998)--Romano's tome tends to offer illuminating case studies and then to respond to them with interpretations, the concision of which is often admirable but sometimes frustrating. This is not to say that Romano offers no analysis. Her critique of what she calls the "love is the answer" strain in Western culture, which incisively argues that such utopian admonitions serve to erase continuing racial inequalities, exemplifies her willingness to interrogate comforting social truths and myths. But on other occasions, Romano falls silent prematurely, or in other ways fails to exploit her fascinating archive to the full. Though some may be glad that Romano declines to repeat the now over-familiar story of Star Trek's interracial kiss and Martin Luther King's response to it, her emphasis on the social rather than the cultural means that she also decides to overlook other contexts of potential interest, such as the devastating critique of the racial politics of The Bodyguard that bell hooks includes in her Outlaw Culture (1994). Similarly, readers of a more cultural bent may be disappointed to note the absence in Race Mixing of any broad-based discussion of African American literature, which has done so much to bring about and respond to the changes in U.S. society since the 1940s. Despite the challenging analyses not only of Toni Morrison's novels but also of Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1994)--a collection of essays about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, which deals directly with issues of interracial sex--Morrison's name is absent from Romano's discussion. Less surprising is Romano's failure to note that her first case study--which concerns the marriage between the Manchester-born Hazel Byrne and the Chicago-born Buford Simpkins, immediately after the Second World War--dovetails fascinatingly with much contemporary British culture, and especially with Shelagh Delaney's debut play A Taste of Honey (1959), the tale of another white Mancunian who falls for (and then falls pregnant by) a visiting black American soldier. However, all these objections are minor ones, and this latter point that I make is simply a personal observation, the result of the fact that I read the book here amid the very different cultural landscape of northern England. Astute and well-judged, Race Mixing is a welcome addition to the study of interracial love in American history, which both offers new information and a new approach. Of particular value is Romano's insistence that even the apparent sweetness of love--even the sweetness signaled in the title of Delaney's play--is neither apolitical nor "free" but suffused with the race matters that remain paramount to American formations of identity and culture. Race Mixing offers a timely reminder of how far America and the Western world have traveled, and how far they still have to go.

Andrew Warnes

University of Leeds