What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe

I n this important book, historian Peggy Pascoe invites readers to look more closely at how miscegenation laws facilitated the construction and reinforcement of racial categories in the United States following the Civil War, when the term ‘‘miscegenation’’ was coined, through the mid-twentieth century. The result is a complex historical narrative that links together race, sexuality, and gender in a way that should appeal to a broad multidisciplinary audience. Laws banning interracial marriages were the last visible symbols of America’s Jim Crow era, surviving more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) signaled the end of legalized racial segregation. Since many Americans bought into the false notion that interracial unions were ‘‘unnatural,’’ periodically Pascoe reminds readers that some early interracial unions were permitted when their existence facilitated the property interests of white men.