ABSTRACT
National narratives—or rather mostly silences—around the reality of interracial sexual relations at the time of the first (colonial) encounters, as well as throughout the antebellum and Jim Crow periods, often result in clouding the private dimensions of individuals’ life choices. The terms used to construct interracial couples as anti-models of families and, soon after, anomalies of nature, were thus social, political and legal tools crafted by White male elites to give a name to sexual practices which had not been considered worthy of notice in the first generation that colonized Northern America. In the 1870s, the provisions of state miscegenation laws allowed imprisonment for interracial couples who persisted in living together, even as married couples12—a behavior which directly challenged the legal construction of interracial intimacy as inherently illicit sex. To conclude on the history of sexual policing of Black–White relations in Alabama and other states, what emerges clearly as the priority of White lawmakers from the colonial period.
