The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. True, but whiggish, where we start at zero justice, ending up somewhere over nine thousand, with progress visible in the aggregate.

This is how we think of interracial marriage. The conventional view would be something like: while slavery, then segregation, kept white and Black from forming romantic unions, after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision, which overturned state laws against interracial marriage, it was first permitted, then accepted, and is now so ordinary as to be not noteworthy.

How this story is wrong as to contemporary society exceeds the scope of a book review, but this book is about how it is wrong historically. The author looks at interracial marriages in the State of Mississippi, starting before the American Civil War and moving chronologically through until just prior to Loving. There is a focus on the courts, in criminal cases, but also will fights and inheritance disputes. In fact, one of the books missteps is that it sometimes seems to shift in thesis to one arguing that it is all about money. While in evidence, it is somewhat reductive and risks falling into the economic anxiety or internal colonialism courses of argumentation, which I think takes away from the real heft of the book.

The history that the author reveals is likely to shift your view, regardless of that view. Starting with what seem to be like love matches between enslaved Black and white people during legal slavery, the topic of how to accommodate interracial marriages was a going concern from Reconstruction onward. The picture that the author draws is of a train-wreck of values, as citizens, lawmen, and legislators try and compromise over something that, by definition, cannot just affect one race, so cannot impinge on the rights of Blacks without doing so also to the rights of whites, not to mention trying to do the same between genders. Trying to come up with rules around races is full of fail, when no one can wholly decide how to apply this social construct to real people, and includes the sort of math around blood quantum that seems like a particularly bleak Monty Python bit.

It is not until the 20th century, influenced by eugenics, that we see narrow and stringent laws enacted and enforced. The whole project of prohibition here is where the Lost Cause mythos has poisoned the facts into assuming a more narrow and implied racist thinking about the past. The good guys may bear some of the burden: it is easy to get into dualistic thinking. But to admit the facts as presented here is to reeeallly show the flimsiness of white supremacy as a concept. If people can bounce in and out of racial attributions, depending on what else is going on, if admixture is pervasive, if interracial relationships are met by the community with a shrug that only becomes an admonition when there is something else on the line, what even is race? It undoes the whole attempted science and is a call coming from inside the house because even if you callously disregard Black equality the ways this impacts on white behavior and identity is unsustainable.

The writing is good. The book passed the citation test in that I did not fall into a rabbit hole whenever I had a question about something. Its only limitation is its specific geographic scope. This is a reasonable limitation, and suggests the lines of further research, but it creates some wariness about the range of the application. Last, I predict that some podcaster is going to make their bones popularizing the Sims case.

My thanks to the author, Kathryn Schumaker, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.

A highly detailed portrayal of interracial marriage in the South, particularly in Mississippi. One would think that such a book would be informative AND entertaining. But that was not the case for me. I made it halfway through before throwing in the towel. The topic is timely, given the nature of our society today. Yet, it reads in a quite dry manner. Details are good, but sometimes they can be too much, to the point that they take away rather than add nuance to the material. Long story short: this was not a winner.

Thanks to Basic Books and NetGalley for this arc, which I voluntarily read and reviewed. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read this book.
This book was quite thought provoking. I can tell that a lot of research went into the project.

A book that covers racism, sexism, and classism—should be a must-read for all who want to understand American history better. It helped me piece together how our nation’s shameful history of slavery and racism continued well after the Emancipation Proclamation through subtle and not-so-subtle legal mechanisms.

Most of us have heard of the Loving case in which the Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in the US. Schumaker focuses on legal records in the state of Mississippi between the civil war and the Loving case, to tease out the history of the state's efforts to block such marriages and the apparent motivations at work. While the white power structure in the state made a lot of noise about the purity of the races, the knots into which they tied themselves over this issue for a century make it clear there was more going on.

Schumaker writes about the actual couples who were prosecuted by the state for their interracial relationships, the content of the evidence presented, and the disposition of each case (where it is possible, as some records have been destroyed by fire). In almost all cases, the cases involved a black woman and a white man, because honestly any couples that were the opposite never made it to court due to the law of lynching. In all of these cases, the couples didn't take their prosecution lying down, but hired lawyers, filed appeals, and in surprisingly few cases left the state. Some actually prevailed, because the laws were so sloppily written and because the white men writing the laws knew the races hadn't been separate in this manner - white men having children with the women they enslaved was common knowledge and they wanted to be sure laws were not written that would catch themselves due to perhaps having a black ancestor. They tied themselves in knots trying to establish that a given couple should be prosecuted due to the wife having a black ancestor - everyone brought testimony about whether that ancestor was really black, or Mexican, or ?? - everyone was so certain they could tell when a person had 1/8 black ancestry just by looking, but then they disagreed about whether a person who died when they were a small child looked black to them.

An interesting series of chapters focused on immigrant Eastern European Jewish men and Italian men who married black or mixed women, and how antisemitism and anti-catholicism played into the prosecutions. Catholic churches, especially on the western side of Mississippi near New Orleans, were less reluctant to marry interracial couples, but that didn't save them from prosecution.

The law was a constantly changing and ambiguous set of poorly written assertions on whether a particular marriage would be allowed, and whether people could be prosecuted for marrying vs. not marrying and just living together, which varied over time. Rhetoric about the maintenance of the races as "pure" papered over the complete absence of any such purity among the actual people of the state. The terms 'adultery' and 'incest' were used in early laws, which added to the confusion because the terms didn't apply to the couples who were prosecuted.

Schumaker demonstrates over and over that the true goal of this slurry of state laws and prosecutions was to preserve property in white hands. When a white man with property died, everyone immediately set about finding a way to avoid giving his property to his mixed race children and to find white relatives who ought to have it instead. The prevention of wealth transfer to black people was the true reason for making such a fuss over interracial marriages, at least in Mississippi. Despite all the noise made by racists about "our daughters" taking up with black men, in fact the ones "taking up" across the color line were white men; the law did not want to go so far as to explicitly criminalize that, because it was a prerogative white men had exercised for centuries. However, when they actually wanted to marry a black woman and pass their property to the children they had together, the state wanted to get involved to prevent it.

This gracefully written book brings to life the actual human beings caught up in this mess. It's an important addition to the full history of racism in the US and of the "wealth gap."

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy of this book.

Tangled Fortunes is a thought-provoking and thoroughly-researched tome that provides a significant addition to the historical record. Dispelling myths and legends regarding the status of interracial marriage in the South, Schumaker provides an alternative thesis to the topic. The main argument is that interracial relationships and marriages continued despite the increase in prohibitive laws during the Jim Crow era. This legislation served to protect white wealth rather than maintain “white racial purity” and supremacy. This topic deserves both careful scrutiny and humanization of the persons it impacted and Schumaker skillfully strikes that balance. Each chapter looks in depth at one particular couple that exemplifies the subject of the chapter. For example, in looking at the “one-drop rule,” readers are introduced to Antonio and Clara. This method made the inclusion of legislation, census records, and data very accessible and engaging.

This book is primarily an exploration of interracial marriage, as well as laws and legislation, particularly in the state of Mississippi. There’s a broader discussion of the laws in the Southern United States, and of legal status of Black people as it concerned marriage and property ownership. It also deals with matters of inheritance and succession, primarily in cases where a white enslaver would have relations with a Black woman or girl he owned to produce (usually) several children, and he did this with multiple women he owned in addition to the white family he had with his wife. These situations sometimes caused disputes where the white children would contest the mixed-race children and try to cut them out of wills or legal inheritances or anything that would financially benefit them. The author provides other examples as well.

In addition, the author primarily presents each chapter as a kind of case study of marriages and unions that took place in specific circumstances.

I DNF’d this at 16% in. I really liked the topic and was excited to read this book but I got lost with all the names of the couples. I think there could have been a bit more development of who these people were. The legal issues were supposed to be the focus but, I think this book would have been better served had the author provided some more background on the couples. Often names were just thrown out with little to no context. Pulling the reader in by providing more details on the couples would provide a more solid connection to the human aspect of the topic. This issue impacted people, seriously impacted their lives but the reader is left wondering who these people were and how these issues really impacted them.