Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption

by Randall Kennedy

Book Overview

With the same piercing intelligence as the bestselling Say it Loud!, Interracial Intimacies hits a nerve at the center of American society: race relations and our most intimate ties to each other.

"The best book written on the subject, an exhaustive source of deep, rich scholarship and surefooted brilliant analysis."--Seattle Times

Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America's racial...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375702644
• ISBN13: 9780375702648
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

This is a full account of the history of legal and social challenges

Randall's book is a very accurate account of the history of interracial relationships of the Black/nonblack variety, most particularly the troublesome and controversial Black-White relationships and marriage. Mr. Kennedy traces the history of interracial relationships from the Colonial/slavery times to the early decade of the 21st century. Mr. Kennedy really knows his history and law regarding this elephant in the room, i.e., interracial relationships between Blacks and Whites. I recommend this book along with J.A. Rogers' Sex and Race. I hope people open their eyes to the largely unexplored and controversial issue of multiracial relationships.

A legal history book I can't put down!

I never thought that a book full of legal history would be as gripping as this book has been!

A painfully beautiful book

The author pulls the mirror up to our faces and makes us confront our own prejudices today and mourn our prejudices of the past. Of all the things I come away with in this book, I wholeheartedly support the author in his view that race matching in adoption is a destructive practice in all its various guises. Yes, 'it ought to be replaced by a system under which children in need of homes may be assigned to the care of foster or adoptive parents as quickly as reasonably possible.' We have several couples in our neighborhood who have adopted children of other races, and two black children are among them. This is real progress. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

Much Better than his last book

This book as a whole is better than his last book whose title I will not name here. I met Randall Kennedy at the college where I teach last year and made it clear to him what I thought of that book. But I like this one. For one thing, it has a lot of rare and little known history such as the sad tale of Black Reactionary George Schuyler and his racially confused daughter, the young lady who was prevented from being adopted in Jim Crow Louisiana due to confusion over her race, and the angry racially-mixed young man who grew up to be a Black Panther. These and numerous other stories are excellently told and are quite informative, as well as facts and figures on interracial marriages and adioption that may surprise street-corner dogmatists on this issue.This book made me view Dr. Kennedy in a new light. Although I still despise his last book, I will merely agree to disagree with him on that one. I think he is sincerely trying to clear up the confusion that abounds over race in this country on both sides (as he makes clear in the afterword) because he actually has hope that this can be done. The sad thing is that many such people WANT to stay confused to provide an outlet for their personal frustrations and are not likely to read this book. As I have said about John McWhorter, I don't agree with all he says, but since he is not of the Ken Hamblin/George Schuyler reactionary school, we have enough common ground as to where I would be happy to speak to him again.

Content With Character

Randall Kennedy's Interracial Intimacies is many things: well-written, well-researched, revealing, disturbing, detailed, and hopeful. Kennedy, a Yale-trained lawyer, a professor at Harvard Law, and the author of the books Race, Crime, and the Law, and Nigger, once again focuses on race and the law as he weaves his way through the topics of interracial sex, marriage, identity, and adoption. Right from the first case, an adoption involving a mixed-race child presented in the Introduction, the reader is introduced to some truly baroque and rococo thinking on the part of often well-meaning people. Kennedy goes where the available evidence leads and writes things that many readers and reviewers will find politically incorrect [e.g., some intimate slave-master relationships were loving; black adults may not always be the best adoptive parents for a black child]. This attention to empirical evidence makes Kennedy a champion in my mind; I truly dislike it when somebody tries to pass off a personal or political agenda as the best answer without presenting any supporting evidence. Even though not the main reason for reading this book [I fell in love with Kennedy's writing when I read Nigger], the following story from my life illustrates one of many reasons why Kennedy's book is relevant to everybody, including a middle-class white guy like me. Back in the '70s, I attended a predominantly white high school in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In my Junior year, I fell in love with the younger sister of a friend of mine. The friend and her sister where first generation Americans and Chinese by descent. I found out in sometimes not-so-subtle ways that being friends with an asian-american and loving one were very different issues. One of my friends concluded what he wrote in my Junior yearbook with a statement that any children I had with my girlfriend would end up being "Red haired big nosed chinks -shame-." That relationship broke up because of the reasons most high school romances end - his going away to college, her parents don't like him, his behavior, while often exemplary compared to his peers, is still pretty insensitive at times - but I'm proud to say that the relationship ended as it began, without race being an issue for the two of us. My only complaint about the book, and it's a small one, is that there are more typos than there ought to be in a book of this caliber [due to the fact, perhaps, that spellcheck programs check for words that are spelled correctly, whether they are used correctly or not]. I share Kennedy's vision of a society that truly deals with every person as an individual. I highly recommend Interracial Intimacies.