Following my response to Jonathan Last earlier, I went back and read his review of Mara Hvistendahl‘s book, where he reaches peak anti-anti racism:
She says that the reason surplus men in the American West didn’t take Native American women as brides was that “their particular Anglo-Saxon breed of racism precluded intermixing.” (Through most of human history distinct racial and ethnic groups have only reluctantly intermarried; that she attributes this reluctance to a specific breed of “racism” says less about the American past than about her own biases.) When she writes that a certain idea dates “all the way back to the West’s predominant creation myth,” she means the Bible.
Sure, anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting marriages between whites and nonwhites (including Native Americans) predate the Revolution, slavery and Jim Crow were constructed on the idea that black people were biologically inferior to white people, and the mere rumor of a black man hitting on a white woman was a death sentence in the American South for many years, but let’s not get carried away and think racism had anything to do with interracial marriage being uncommon. It’s really because it’s yucky.
